Journal of Risk and Financial Management

Unlike purely domestic firms, multinational companies have distinctive opportunities to engage in sophisticated international tax planning strategies. This study investigates whether banks perceive potential earnings repatriation taxes as a significant source of risk when designing loan agreements for these firms. Our findings reveal that U.S. multinationals facing higher potential repatriation tax burdens are subject to wider loan spreads, indicating increased risk premiums. Moreover, this effect is especially pronounced among firms with low profitability or limited financial flexibility, highlighting the risk-sensitive nature of these loans. We also observe that lenders are more likely to demand collateral and impose stricter financial covenants in loans to firms with substantial repatriation tax exposure, further underscoring that banks regard these taxes as a firm-specific risk factor. By exploring the intersection of international tax considerations, potential earnings repatriation taxes here, and debt contracting, our research makes a valuable contribution to the literature, shedding light on how global tax issues influence credit markets and lending behavior.

Financial inclusion is widely promoted as a mechanism for enhancing financial empowerment, yet evidence on how access to formal financial services translates into individual financial competencies remains limited, particularly in emerging market youth contexts. This study examines the effect of financial inclusion on financial knowledge, financial capabilities, and financial literacy among Generation Z university students in South Africa. Using cross-sectional survey data from 428 students at a public university and analysing the data using partial least squares structural equation modelling (PLS-SEM), this study finds that financial inclusion has a positive and statistically significant effect on all three dimensions of financial human capital. However, descriptive results reveal a nuance between relatively high levels of financial inclusion and more moderate, heterogeneous levels of financial capability. Additional analyses uncover important heterogeneities: female students exhibit higher financial outcomes and stronger inclusion effects than males, while financial inclusion translates into improved financial capabilities and literacy only for commerce students. For non-commerce students, inclusion is associated with higher financial knowledge but not with applied financial skills or literacy. These findings highlight the conditional nature of financial inclusion and underscore the need to complement access with structured financial education and capability-building interventions in emerging market contexts.

Each year, inventory decisions made under demand uncertainty generate substantial economic losses, reflecting a persistent disconnect between forecasting models and the operational decisions they are intended to support. This paper addresses this gap by proposing a Decision Intelligence Framework that unifies three components typically treated in isolation: probabilistic demand forecasting via gradient boosting quantile regression, constrained newsvendor optimization under capacity and budget constraints, and coherent tail risk evaluation using Conditional Value-at-Risk (CVaR₉₅). We establish a central theoretical result showing that calibrated quantile forecasts are mathematically equivalent to optimal newsvendor solutions, providing a rigorous decision-theoretic foundation linking probabilistic forecasting and inventory control. The framework is evaluated on the UCI Online Retail dataset (2010–2011), aggregated to daily demand at the country–SKU level and densified to a daily panel by treating missing transaction days as zero demand. Relative to median-based (P50) policies, P90 policies reduce tail risk (CVaR₉₅) by 26.7% under empirical residual bootstrap, increase cycle service levels from 44.4% to 89.5%, and reduce mean cost by 48.7% (non-overlapping bootstrap CIs for CVaR₉₅). A lognormal stress test shows larger reductions (72.3%), and a CV sweep confirms monotone gains in this setting.