Search Results (397)

Corporate net-zero pledges have proliferated across the Middle East, yet whether capital markets distinguish credible decarbonization strategies from symbolic ones remains unexamined in energy-exporting emerging markets, a gap this study addresses. This omission matters because the six Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) economies in our sample face acute stranded-asset exposure amid national diversification programmes such as Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030 and the UAE’s Operation 300bn. We test whether net-zero credibility is associated with firm valuation among 167 listed firms across seven Middle Eastern countries (2020–2025, 1002 firm-year observations), constructing a five-dimension Credibility Index (pathway specificity, capex alignment, verification, policy compliance, and track record) and applying event-study, pooled panel regression, mediation, moderation, and firm/year fixed-effects analysis. The index is internally consistent (Cronbach’s α = 0.92) and its estimated valuation association is invariant to equal, alternative and leave-one-out weighting schemes. Credibility is positively associated with all four valuation multiples (p < 0.001, firm-clustered standard errors); a one-standard-deviation increase corresponds to a 0.133 increase in Tobin’s Q (95% CI [0.116, 0.149]). High-credibility announcements earn cumulative abnormal returns 5.95 percentage points above low-credibility announcements over (−5, +5) trading days (95% CI [4.79, 7.11]), a gap robust to nonparametric tests, placebo dates and strictly pre-announcement credibility scoring. The association survives firm and year fixed effects (within-firm β = 0.119 per SD, p < 0.001). No moderator—foreign ESG fund, domestic institutional or sovereign wealth fund ownership, regulatory stringency, carbon intensity or financial health—reaches significance after correction for multiple testing, so we find no evidence of investor-type or jurisdictional heterogeneity in this sample. To the authors’ knowledge, this is the first Middle East-calibrated, capex-verified credibility index and the first evidence on the pricing of transition authenticity across GCC markets and Egypt, informing regulators, boards, and ESG investors. Full article

This study contributes to the literature on sustainable international investment by examining how public data openness—treated as a non-rivalrous production factor—enables firms to overcome information asymmetries, reduce financing constraints, and catalyze innovation-driven overseas expansion. Grounded in China’s dual strategic imperatives of digital factor marketization and high-quality outbound investment, we exploit the staggered rollout of municipal public data platforms (2008–2023) as a quasi-natural experiment and apply a firm- and city-level staggered difference-in-differences (DID) design to a sample of A-share listed firms. Our findings demonstrate that public data openness significantly enhances the sustainability of outward investment, measured through improved capital allocation efficiency and long-term resilience. Mechanism tests reveal that innovation capacity and eased financing constraints serve as key transmission channels, with stronger effects observed in firms with higher human capital endowments, robust internal controls, and exposure to technologically dynamic sectors. Heterogeneity analyses further indicate that the sustainability impact is amplified under environmental uncertainty, suggesting that data openness acts as an institutional buffer. The results offer actionable policy implications for aligning digital governance with corporate sustainability goals, and provide empirical grounding for integrating open data infrastructure into national strategies for responsible internationalization. Full article

The decision-oriented conception of enterprise risk management (ERM), in which risks are quantified, aggregated, and weighed against return when business decisions are prepared, is increasingly regarded as the core of value-based management. In Germany, this conception acquired a legal foundation in 2021: Section 1 of the Stabilization and Restructuring Framework for Enterprises Act (StaRUG), the Financial Market Integrity Strengthening Act (FISG), and the amended Section 91(3) of the German Stock Corporation Act (AktG) require continuous monitoring of developments that may jeopardize the company’s continued existence, the initiation of “appropriate countermeasures” once a critical threshold is exceeded, and direct communication of the risk situation to the supervisory board. This paper argues that these obligations are difficult to satisfy without risk aggregation by Monte Carlo simulation and a quantitative risk-bearing-capacity concept, the same apparatus that underpins simulation-based valuation. The study asks whether listed firms report using it. The 2021 annual reports of 83 DAX- and MDAX-listed companies (excluding banks, exchanges, and insurers) are scored against eleven criteria capturing disclosed risk management practice. Because the instrument reads public reporting rather than internal process, the scores are interpreted throughout as a lower bound on practice. The average score is 0.73 of a possible 2.0 (about 37%). StaRUG is named by no company; FISG is by roughly 31%; and only a minority disclose adequate risk aggregation or a risk-bearing-capacity concept with a defined threshold. The pattern, near-universal assertion of readiness to act, combined with near-absence of the quantitative apparatus that would make such action triggerable, is consistent with ceremonial conformity decoupled from substantive practice. The value-relevant core of risk management thus remains largely unreported. Because the same apparatus generates the cost of capital and the decision value used in simulation-based valuation, the scores also function as a diagnostic of valuation capability: a firm that cannot aggregate its risks must import a discount rate rather than derive one. This has implications for valuation, governance, supervisory oard liability, and audit. Full article

Agricultural subsidy policies have increasingly shifted from production-oriented support toward incentives that reward environmental stewardship and the provision of ecosystem services. Despite their rapid expansion, evidence regarding the environmental effectiveness, economic efficiency, market implications, and food-security consequences of these eco-centric agricultural subsidies remains fragmented across policy frameworks and regions. This review synthesizes current evidence on eco-centric agricultural subsidies by comparatively evaluating their environmental, economic, and policy outcomes across developed and developing economies. The review was conducted using a structured literature search following PRISMA-informed review procedures, drawing upon peer-reviewed articles, systematic reviews, policy evaluations, and international institutional reports retrieved from major scientific databases and policy sources. The evidence indicates that eco-centric subsidies generally improve biodiversity conservation, soil health, carbon sequestration, water quality, and reductions in chemical inputs when payments are appropriately targeted and supported by effective monitoring and institutional capacity. Performance-based and results-oriented payment schemes frequently demonstrate greater environmental additionality and cost-effectiveness than conventional practice-based payments; however, their broader implementation remains constrained by monitoring costs, verification requirements, administrative complexity, and regional institutional capacity. Economic outcomes are more heterogeneous, with benefits depending on program design, agroecological conditions, market structures, and farm characteristics. While these subsidies can enhance environmental returns on public investment, challenges including land-value capitalization, unequal benefit distribution, transaction costs, market distortions, and potential short-term productivity trade-offs remain important policy concerns. Evidence regarding food-security impacts is similarly context-dependent and varies across production systems and geographical regions. Overall, the review demonstrates that no single subsidy instrument is universally effective. Instead, the greatest environmental and economic benefits are achieved through integrated policy portfolios combining targeted incentives, outcome-based payments, robust monitoring systems, digital technologies, carbon-market integration, and equitable program design. The review also identifies important evidence gaps concerning developing-country experiences, long-term cost-effectiveness, and standardized evaluation frameworks, providing priorities for future research and policy development. Full article

This study examines the impact of the Russian–Ukrainian war on global financial stability, focusing on currency crises, exchange-rate dynamics, and economic vulnerability during 2003–2024 with an outlook for subsequent years. The objective is to assess how geopolitical shocks, combined with global monetary tightening, influenced the frequency and intensity of currency crises across developed and emerging economies. The study applies a quantitative comparative methodology based on a modified Exchange Market Pressure Index (EMPI) using monthly IMF data on exchange rates, reserves, interest rates, and depreciation dynamics. Currency crises are identified through threshold-based criteria, enabling cross-country and temporal comparison. A conceptual framework explains how geopolitical risk affects currency markets, financial stability, and macroeconomic performance. The findings show that crisis episodes were more frequently concentrated around the Great Recession, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the Russian–Ukrainian war. Emerging economies were more vulnerable, experiencing stronger capital outflows, sharper currency depreciation, and more frequent crises, while developed economies were affected mainly through inflation and energy price shocks. The war intensified financial fragmentation, increased safe-haven flows toward the US dollar, gold, and Swiss franc, and raised systemic risks in debt, banking, and corporate sectors. The study concludes that differentiated macroeconomic strategies, stronger external buffers, and enhanced international financial coordination are necessary to reduce risks and preserve currency stability. Full article

Whether the marketization of data as a production factor can be redirected toward environmental ends is a central question for the governance of the digital economy. This study investigates whether and how the pilot policy for big data trading platforms improves corporate green development performance (CGDP). Using A-share firms listed on the Shanghai and Shenzhen stock exchanges from 2010 to 2024, this paper treats the pilot policy for big data trading platforms as a quasi-natural experiment and applies a staggered difference-in-differences (DID) design to estimate its effect on CGDP, together with the transmission channels and boundary conditions that govern it. Because the rollout is staggered, we complement the two-way fixed-effects benchmark with the heterogeneity-robust estimators of Callaway and Sant’Anna, Sun and Abraham, and the Goodman–Bacon decomposition, and cluster standard errors at the city level. The policy raises CGDP by 0.076, about 6.1% of the sample mean. The estimate remains robust to an event-study/parallel-trend test, placebo tests, propensity score matching (PSM), the Oster selection-on-unobservables bound, alternative and broader green outcome measures—including a significant reduction in chemical oxygen-demand emissions—controls for concurrent digital and innovation policies, exclusion of the 2020 pandemic year, and industry fixed effects. Mechanism evidence shows that the effect operates through stronger green dual innovation, upgraded human capital, and heightened scrutiny from media outlets and securities analysts. The impact is stronger for firms whose executives exhibit greater green awareness and whose internal control is of higher quality, and in more competitive industries and regions with stricter environmental regulation. By showing that a market for data can be redirected toward environmental ends, this study links data-factor marketization to corporate green transition and provides policy evidence for aligning digital economy reform with sustainable development. Full article

The objective of this paper is to examine the United Arab Emirates (UAE) as a test case of Gulf energy transition finance by analyzing how a hydrocarbon-dependent economy is constructing the financial, regulatory, and institutional architecture required to move from net-zero pledges to climate finance flows. Rather than treating climate finance as a set of isolated instruments, the paper conceptualizes the UAE’s approach as a state-led transition-finance model shaped by Gulf state capitalism, sovereign wealth accumulation, national oil company strategy, financial regulation, and post-COP28 climate diplomacy. Using a qualitative policy and institutional review, the paper maps the UAE’s transition-finance architecture across three interrelated dimensions: institutions and governance, financial instruments, and policy alignment. It examines the role of federal strategies such as Net Zero 2050 and the UAE Energy Strategy 2050, regulatory actors including the Central Bank of the UAE, the Securities and Commodities Authority (SCA), Abu Dhabi Global Market (ADGM), and Dubai Financial Services Authority (DFSA), and key financial mechanisms including green bonds and sukuk, sustainability-linked finance, sovereign wealth fund investments, national oil company decarbonization strategies, blended-finance platforms, and carbon-market mechanisms. The analysis finds that the UAE has developed a distinctive state-led, finance-centric model for financing the energy transition. This model enables rapid capital mobilization, de-risking of private investment, and strong international positioning, particularly following COP28 and the launch of ALTÉRRA. However, its effectiveness is constrained by unresolved tensions between net-zero ambition and hydrocarbon expansion, fragmented sustainable-finance regulation, limited carbon-pricing signals, uneven disclosure practices, underdeveloped domestic green capital markets, and restricted access to green finance for SMEs. The paper argues that the UAE’s climate-finance architecture is best understood neither as simple green diversification nor as symbolic climate positioning, but as an emerging Gulf model of transition finance: well-capitalized, and institutionally coordinated, yet structurally shaped by the same hydrocarbon rents and state-led governance logics it seeks to transform. By positioning the UAE as a benchmark, the paper contributes to debates on climate finance, state capitalism, and transition governance in hydrocarbon-dependent economies, while identifying the coherence gaps to be addressed for climate finance to support economy-wide decarbonization. Full article

The value of informatization lies not only in expanding urban digital infrastructure, but also in reshaping firm behavior through improvements in the information environment. Using China’s smart city pilot program as a quasi-natural experiment and a sample of Chinese A-share listed firms, this study examines whether urban-level informatization affects corporate ESG performance. The staggered difference-in-differences estimates show that smart city pilots significantly improve firms’ ESG performance, and the result remains robust after a range of endogeneity checks and robustness tests. Mechanism analyses provide evidence consistent with the proposed external monitoring and internal governance channels. Specifically, smart city pilots are associated with stronger monitoring by capital-market participants and improved internal governance conditions, in line with investor attention theory and organizational information processing theory. The effect is more pronounced for firms whose executives have environmental backgrounds, firms in heavily polluting industries, and firms located in regions with stronger environmental regulation. Further tests show that ESG improvements induced by informatization increase both short-term profitability and long-term market valuation. These findings reveal how urban informatization promotes corporate ESG performance and show that ESG improvements can help firms align social value with economic value. Full article

Fiscal shocks in post-land-finance China are weakening the funding basis of capital-intensive metro public-private partnership (PPP) projects, but the system-level mechanism through which public fiscal stress becomes subcontractor-level financial viability pressure remains underexplained. This study examines a section-level metro PPP project ecosystem in a sub-provincial Chinese city to trace this transmission mechanism and its financial implications. The analysis combines de-identified audit evidence and interviews with a scenario-based structural NPV model and 800,000 model-generated Monte Carlo realizations under calibrated institutional scenarios. The evidence indicates that quasi-bureaucratic SPV internal capital-market arrangements convert fiscal shortfalls into vertical and horizontal cross-subsidization practices, preserving short-term project continuity while shifting cash-flow pressure downstream. This condition is defined as a strategic resilience trap: practices that preserve short-term project continuity while potentially eroding the project ecosystem’s long-term adaptive capacity. Under calibrated assumptions, improving the contract-payment channel reduces model-generated losses by approximately 4%, suggesting that payment punctuality addresses only one part of the wider internal capital-market mechanism. Full article

Payroll-anchored retail borrowers—individuals whose monthly remuneration is routed into an account at the lending institution through a salary-project arrangement—constitute the volume backbone of unsecured consumer lending in Kazakhstan, generating the largest origination flow, the lowest realized default rate, and the majority of the systemic regulatory and capital sensitivities of second-tier banks. Payroll anchoring also changes the lender’s information set, which motivates a study of how that advantage translates into model performance and borrower outcomes. We design and internally validate an explainable hybrid artificial-intelligence framework stratified by client tenure into two production models: a Weight-of-Evidence (WOE) logistic-regression scorecard for new salary-project applicants, and a hybrid scorecard for repeat applicants, in which a stacked ensemble of LightGBM, CatBoost and a multi-head self-attention neural network contributes a single WOE-encoded predictor to a second-stage L2-regularized logistic regression. The hybrid recovers a substantial share of the ensemble’s discriminatory lift while preserving an auditable, monotone scorecard at the point of decision, and isotonic recalibration restores the predicted probabilities of default to the empirical bad-rate scale required for IFRS 9 expected-credit-loss accrual and risk-based pricing. We report discrimination, calibration and stability evidence under a strict anti-leakage protocol and set out the structural preconditions under which the architecture transfers to other emerging-market payroll-anchored portfolios. We are explicit about scope: a true out-of-time validation and a full group-conditional fairness audit are identified as required next steps rather than claimed here. The contribution is a reproducible, interpretable scoring design that exploits payroll visibility while retaining full coefficient interpretability inside the production decision engine. Full article

The classical monetary trilemma implies a binding trade-off among exchange rate stability, capital mobility, and monetary autonomy. Yet, emerging market economies increasingly operate hybrid policy configurations that depart systematically from the trilemma’s corner solutions. This paper proposes a continuous, time-varying measure of such departures—the Hybridity of Regime Index (HRI)—extracted via a dynamic factor model from sub-indices capturing exchange rate hybridity, capital account segmentation, and effective monetary autonomy for a balanced panel of thirty emerging markets over the period 2005–2024. The analysis yields four principal findings. First, a secular increase in average regime hybridity is observed, with a marked acceleration following the financial fragmentation shocks of 2022. Second, moderate hybridity is associated with attenuated output and inflation volatility, and local projections show that high-HRI economies experience milder output contractions in the immediate aftermath of global financial shocks. Third, panel threshold regressions identify an endogenous HRI level beyond which the stabilizing effect reverses: further hybridity amplifies macroeconomic volatility and erodes reserve adequacy. Fourth, the post-2022 geopolitical fragmentation of the international monetary system has amplified the pre-existing trend toward hybridity, with sanction-affected economies exhibiting discontinuous jumps in HRI that push them into the high-vulnerability regime. This paper characterizes this non-linear pattern as a resilience–vulnerability nexus and discusses its implications for early warning indicators and for the assessment of policy responses to the fragmentation of the international monetary system. Full article

Using an international sample of firms from 47 countries/regions over the years 2010–2020, we examine whether third-party verification of carbon emissions information affects the speed at which firms adjust their capital structure toward the trade-off theory’s optimal leverage target. Using alternative estimation techniques and robustness checks, we find that third-party carbon assurance significantly accelerates firms’ leverage adjustment speed. Firms that engage in independent carbon verification adjust more rapidly toward their target capital structure than non-assured firms. We extended our investigation and confirmed that this effect persists across both developed and developing markets. These results support the notion that carbon assurance is associated with lower information asymmetry between firms and lenders, thereby lowering the cost of external debt and facilitating faster capital structure rebalancing. We further investigate whether the relationship differs by assurance provider type by distinguishing between Big Four and non-Big Four assurance providers. The results remain robust when distinguishing between Big Four and non-Big Four assurance providers regardless of the assurer quality, confirming that assured firms adjust their capital structures faster than non-assured firms. The outcomes of this study demonstrate that firms’ sustainability reporting can shape the speed of capital structure adjustment. Full article

Sustainable innovation constitutes the cornerstone of firms’ long-term competitive edge, yet the underlying mechanisms via which patient capital facilitates corporate sustainable innovation remain understudied. Based on a sample of Chinese A-share listed firms spanning 2013 to 2024, this study operationalizes patient capital through two proxies: relational debt and stable institutional ownership. We systematically investigate the impact of patient capital on sustainable innovation, alongside the mediating pathway of internal control quality and the moderating role of climate policy uncertainty. The empirical outcomes indicate that both forms of patient capital exert a significant positive effect on sustainable innovation, with internal control quality serving as a partial mediator in this relationship. Additionally, climate policy uncertainty reinforces the promotional influence of patient capital on sustainable innovation. We further stratify heterogeneity analyses into two dimensions: firm-inherent heterogeneity and external environmental heterogeneity. From the perspective of endogenous firm attributes, the innovation-stimulating effect of patient capital differs markedly across enterprises with distinct ownership types, life-cycle stages, and total asset sizes. Externally, the observed positive impact varies considerably conditional on industrial factor intensity and the regional marketization degree of the firm’s location. These findings expand the existing literature concerning long-term capital and sustainable innovation, and yield actionable implications for corporate management, institutional investors, and policymakers. Full article

This study investigates the complex and nonlinear interaction between the dual circulation paradigm and high-quality full employment. Moving beyond the limitations of conventional static partial equilibrium frameworks, the analysis conceptualizes this relationship as a system of three interrelated feedback loops. Drawing on system dynamics (SD) theory, a set of nonlinear differential equations is developed, with model parameters calibrated using macroeconomic data from 2010 to 2025. The simulation results yield three main findings. First, international trade, cross-border investment, and technological exchange jointly form a core reinforcing feedback loop that underpins the mutually beneficial interaction between domestic and international circulations. Second, the integrated development of education, technology, and human capital emerges as a critical state variable for overcoming the persistent trade-off between employment quantity and quality. Third, the interplay between horizontal market expansion and vertical technological advancement constitutes a dual driving mechanism that facilitates the system’s transition toward a higher-level equilibrium, with multi-factor interactions generating pronounced nonlinear multiplier effects. Overall, the study provides a quantitative basis for designing adaptive and targeted employment policies within the dual circulation framework. Full article

With the digital economy advancing at a fast pace, digital transformation plays a pivotal role in reinforcing firms’ innovation capability and promoting high-quality development. This study analyzes Chinese non-financial publicly listed firms on the A-share market over the period 2009–2023. Based on text mining of annual reports, this study constructs an index capturing digital transformation and empirically evaluate its impact on innovation output with firm and year fixed effects. The estimates suggest that digital transformation meaningfully increases firms’ innovation output; the inference is unchanged when applying instrumental-variable approaches and conducting extensive robustness checks. Mechanism analysis reveals two parallel channels: (1) the R&D investment mechanism, characterized by improvements in R&D intensity, capitalization rate, per capita efficiency, and investment growth; (2) the governance environment mechanism, reflected in enhanced internal control, improved information disclosure quality, and strengthened audit supervision. Once firms are stratified by characteristics, the estimated positive effect of digital transformation is most pronounced for firms with low financial constraints, large size, eastern locations, and state ownership. This study identifies both direct and indirect mechanisms linking digital transformation to innovation and highlights how firm- and region-specific features condition the magnitude of this effect, thereby offering empirical implications for corporate digitalization strategies and policy design. Full article