Search Results (6,836)

Sustainable Responsible Investment (SRI) emphasizes the integration of Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) factors into investment decisions. This study examines the relationship between ESG disclosures and individual investors’ trading behaviors, with corporate reputation as a mediating construct within the framework of signaling theory. Extending signaling theory, the study incorporates both cognitive and affective dimensions of corporate reputation to explain how ESG signals are interpreted by investors in emerging markets. Primary data were collected in 2025 from 390 individual investors in the Pakistan Stock Exchange (PSX), and Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) was used for analysis. The findings reveal that environmental and governance disclosures have a significant positive impact on investors’ behaviors, while social disclosures show a limited direct effect on both cognitive and affective corporate reputation dimensions. The results further indicate that corporate reputation significantly mediates the relationship between environmental and governance disclosures and investors’ behaviors. However, no mediation effect is observed for social disclosures. The study demonstrates that both cognitive (rational evaluation) and affective (emotional trust) dimensions of corporate reputation enhance the credibility of ESG signals and strengthen their influence on investment decisions. Overall, the study contributes to the ESG and signaling theory literature by highlighting how dual-dimensional corporate reputation shapes investors’ responses to ESG disclosures in emerging markets such as Pakistan. Full article

This study examines the joint and interactive effects of environmental, social, and governance (ESG) performance and digital transformation on firm value by using a sample of 64 non-financial firms listed on the Saudi Exchange over 2020–2024. The empirical analysis employs panel data techniques, feasible generalized least squares (FGLS), Driscoll–Kraay standard errors, and two-stage least squares (2SLS) estimation. The results show that ESG performance is positively associated with firm value, which suggests that capital markets reward firms for sustainability activities. Digital transformation also shows a positive association with firm value and is consistent with its role as a driver of firm valuation. The positive interaction between ESG and digital transformation suggests that digitalization reinforces the association between ESG practices and firm value. The findings remain robust across alternative model specifications and firm value measures. Digital transformation is measured with a text-based disclosure index built from digital-related keywords in annual reports. The index captures disclosed digital orientation rather than realized digital capability, so a high disclosure frequency may partly reflect signalling or impression management rather than fully deployed digital infrastructure. The findings show the importance of adding digital strategies to sustainability practices and provide useful implications for managers, investors, and policymakers under Saudi Vision 2030. Full article

Digital influencers have become increasingly relevant in tourism communication, particularly in the dissemination of destination-related information and experiences through social media. This study examines the association between selected digital influencer attributes and respondents’ perceived influence of travel influencers. A quantitative survey of social media users who followed digital influencers was conducted, yielding 147 valid responses. The questionnaire measured perceptions of influencer-generated content, credibility, authenticity, influencer experience, interactivity, relationship-related characteristics, and other relevant attributes using seven-point Likert scales. An exploratory principal component analysis (PCA) with Oblimin rotation was conducted to identify the empirical structure of the observed dimensions, followed by binary logistic regression to examine their associations with respondents’ perceived influence by travel influencers. The PCA yielded eight empirical components accounting for 81.188% of the total variance. Among the dimensions included in the estimated regression model, content essence was the only predictor that reached conventional statistical significance (β = 0.556, p = 0.035; Exp(B) = 1.743). The remaining predictors did not reach statistical significance at the 5% level. The findings provide exploratory evidence that content-related characteristics may have particular statistical relevance for respondents’ perceived influence by travel influencers when several influencer-related components are considered simultaneously. However, the results should be interpreted as statistical associations rather than causal effects. The study contributes to the tourism influencer marketing literature by highlighting the relevance of content-related characteristics while emphasizing the need for further research using larger samples, validated measurement models, and clearly specified behavioral outcomes. Full article

This study examines whether investor attention and the market information environment transmit environmental, social, and governance (ESG) information into stock returns. The analysis employs a balanced panel of 31 mining companies listed on the Indonesia Stock Exchange from 2019 to 2023, comprising 155 firm-year observations. ESG performance is measured using an external ESG score, investor attention is proxied by the Google Search Volume Index, and the information environment is captured inversely by the relative bid–ask spread. Firm fixed-effects models with heteroskedasticity-robust standard errors clustered at the firm level are estimated for the investor-attention, spread, and stock-return equations. Indirect effects are assessed using 5000 firm-level cluster-bootstrap replications. The results show that ESG performance is not significantly associated with contemporaneous stock returns. ESG is positively but only marginally associated with investor attention and significantly associated with a narrower relative bid–ask spread, indicating a more favourable information environment. Investor attention and the relative spread are significantly associated with stock returns. However, neither the attention-mediated effect nor the spread-mediated effect is statistically significant. These findings distinguish ESG signal recognition from signal pricing, showing that ESG information can influence investor attention and the market information environment without forming a statistically significant transmission mechanism to contemporaneous stock returns. Full article

This study examines whether environmental, social, and governance (ESG) scores among financial institutions across Asia, Europe, and the United States are converging toward a common global standard or settling into distinct regional regimes. Using a panel of 843 publicly listed banks and financial firms over fifteen fiscal years (7754 firm-year observations), the analysis applies sigma-convergence, cross-sectional beta-convergence, and a dynamic panel specification with firm and year fixed effects. Within-region ESG dispersion has narrowed significantly in Europe and the United States but widened in Asia, even as all three regions display strong beta-convergence, with laggard firms closing the gap within about a year. A pooled model with region interaction terms and a Chow test, both of which impose the regional grouping in advance, reject the hypothesis of a single global convergence process, a conclusion independently corroborated by a model-free Phillips–Sul log-t test and clustering algorithm, supporting a club convergence interpretation in which European and Asian financial firms gravitate toward a materially higher steady-state ESG level than their American counterparts, whose mean score remains twenty points lower at the most recent fiscal year. Robustness checks across all three regions, including industry subsamples in Europe, developed versus emerging market banks in Asia, and coverage-depth splits in the United States, confirm findings are not artifacts of sample composition. These results imply that benchmarks calibrated to a single global ESG threshold would misclassify firms operating under different regional convergence clubs. Full article

As electric vehicles scale up, battery recycling has become critical to the circular economy. Yet ESG adoption in battery recycling is not merely an internal managerial choice but is also shaped by green social expectations and social comparison among firms. This study examines how these two forces affect recycling and pricing under non-adoption, partial adoption, and full adoption. We develop a dynamic game model in which green social expectations generate goodwill premiums and losses, while comparison-induced pride and guilt feed back into goodwill accumulation and strategic decisions. We find that green social expectations strengthen recycling incentives and reshape market demand through goodwill effects. Interestingly, guilt exerts a stronger effect than pride in social comparison, encouraging firms to increase recycling effort and accumulate higher goodwill. We also find that full ESG adoption helps firms build stable goodwill advantages, ease price competition, and improve long-term profitability. By contrast, partial adoption may trigger free-riding and strategic divergence. A key theoretical contribution is the joint integration of green social expectations, social comparison, and ESG adoption within a unified dynamic framework, with goodwill linking behavioral responses to firms’ recycling and pricing decisions. Managerially, firms should align ESG practices with continuous recycling effort, while regulators should improve the transparency and comparability of ESG performance to facilitate coordinated adoption. Full article

This study examines differences between monolingual and bilingual students’ self-reported 21st-century skills in higher education, with attention to the contributions of demographic and academic factors. Drawing on data from a linguistically and socioeconomically diverse sample of higher education students, the study considers these skills as part of broader educational concerns related to students’ preparation for academic, social, and labor market demands. Data were collected through an online questionnaire completed by 564 Israeli undergraduate students. The analysis focused on differences between monolingual and bilingual students and on the role of socioeconomic indicators, including family income and mother’s education, as well as academic degree, year of study, and employment status. Results showed that bilingual students reported higher levels in selected subscales, including cognitive processes such as critical thinking and problem-solving, intellectual openness, and interpersonal skills such as teamwork. No significant differences were found for creativity. Hierarchical regression analyses showed that demographic, socioeconomic, academic, and employment variables were associated with perceived skill levels, with different patterns for monolingual and bilingual students. Overall, the findings point to domain-specific differences between bilingual and monolingual students and highlight the importance of contextual and demographic factors. They suggest that bilingual experience may be associated with specific cognitive, intrapersonal, and interpersonal skill domains, although these associations should be interpreted with caution, given the cross-sectional, self-report design. The findings also suggest the value of creating structured opportunities for multilingual engagement in educational settings as one possible way to support 21st-century skills among students from diverse linguistic and socioeconomic backgrounds. Full article

The conventional business case for environmental, social and governance (ESG) integration assumes that organisations invest because consumers, investors and markets reward them for doing so. This study examines what drives ESG investment when that market reward is absent. Drawing on twelve semi-structured interviews across executive and functional roles in a South African fast-moving consumer goods manufacturer serving low-income consumers, the findings show that ESG adoption is continuity-led rather than demand-led. Participants consistently explain environmental investment in terms of protecting organisational continuity by maintaining production during power outages, reducing exposure to climate-related disruption, and lowering operating costs in a market where price is decisive. Sustainability is therefore pursued not because the market rewards it, but because the operating environment makes its absence increasingly costly. Yet the same market cannot finance these investments. Because the organisation serves highly price-sensitive consumers through cash-and-carry channels, the additional costs cannot be recovered through higher prices. The study identifies an endorsement–funding gap in which stakeholders support responsible organisational conduct while resisting the expenditure needed to achieve it. In this case, the gap is bridged by an owner–principal with direct authority over capital in an organisation without a formal board. This study contributes a continuity-led explanation of ESG adoption in constrained emerging-market settings, identifies the endorsement–funding gap as a distinct barrier facing low-margin organisations, and suggests that ownership structure shapes ESG adoption by determining who has the authority to finance investments that markets cannot support. It further argues that where ESG depends on individual authority rather than institutionalised systems, its long-term durability remains uncertain. Beyond the case, the findings suggest that in comparable emerging-market settings the binding constraint on ESG adoption may be finance rather than motivation, so that policy instruments which close the financing gap, together with measurement and assurance systems that institutionalise commitment, may matter more for sustainable business conduct in these settings than demand-side incentives designed for affluent markets. Full article

Balancing decarbonization with grid reliability requires managing renewable volatility through Renewable Portfolio Standards (RPSs) or Capacity Remuneration Mechanisms (CRMs) alongside carbon emission trading (CET). However, their comparative systemic impacts remain unclear. This study evaluates the strategic equivalence of CET-RPS and CET-CRM regulations using a Stackelberg duopoly model. We endogenize grid-side storage investment and parameterize source-storage synergy to establish a rigorous equivalence mapping anchored in a unified macroeconomic penetration target. The results reveal that the CRM exhibits dual systemic impacts contingent on technological readiness. Immature conditions necessitate excessive capacity prices, inducing speculative over-investment. Conversely, mature synergy creates a substitution effect that efficiently offsets public compensation budgets. Furthermore, the dynamic policy phase boundary demonstrates that stricter decarbonization targets require higher technological readiness for the CRM to dominate the RPS in social welfare. Additionally, imposing stringent administrative capacity derating factors on storage fails to alter its physical deployment, instead unintentionally transferring wealth to conventional high-carbon generators. Regulators must therefore synchronize capacity market deployment with storage technology maturity and adopt dynamic capacity accreditation to prevent such distributional distortions. Full article

Digital visual marketing increasingly relies on aesthetically modified social media content to attract consumers, yet such practices may also create authenticity risks when online representations are compared with actual experiences. This study examines how four visual modification cues in destination photos—light–shadow atmosphere, tone enhancement, framing angle, and focus prominence—shape post-visit destination trust, value co-destruction, and revisit intention, and whether persuasion knowledge moderates these effects. Survey data from 572 tourists who viewed Chongqing-related social media photos before visiting the city were analyzed using structural equation modeling, bootstrap mediation analysis, and hierarchical regression. Tone enhancement, framing angle, and focus prominence increased destination trust, whereas light–shadow atmosphere did not. Light–shadow atmosphere, tone enhancement, and framing angle increased value co-destruction, whereas focus prominence did not. Destination trust positively affected revisit intention, while value co-destruction had a negative effect. The two mediators operated as largely independent evaluative paths, with the trust pathway exerting the stronger effect. Persuasion knowledge weakened trust gains and amplified value co-destruction. These findings show that digital visual marketing produces asymmetric post-experience outcomes and highlight the need to balance aesthetic optimization with authentic representation when designing social media marketing content. Full article

Virtual influencers have emerged as an important marketing tool in social commerce and digital consumer engagement. However, limited research has examined how virtual influencer characteristics shape consumers’ green purchase intention through underlying emotional and relational mechanisms. Drawing upon Parasocial Interaction Theory and Affect-as-Information Theory, this study investigates the effects of perceived authenticity, social presence, and interactivity on consumers’ green purchase intention, with parasocial intimacy and emotional arousal serving as mediating variables. A mixed-method approach integrating Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modeling (PLS-SEM) and fuzzy-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis (fsQCA) was employed. Data were collected from 346 consumers who had prior experience interacting with virtual influencers and purchasing green products. The PLS-SEM results indicate that perceived authenticity, social presence, and interactivity significantly enhance parasocial intimacy and emotional arousal, which subsequently increase green purchase intention. Furthermore, the fsQCA findings reveal multiple configurational pathways leading to high green purchase intention, suggesting that different combinations of virtual influencer characteristics can generate similar consumer outcomes. This study contributes to the electronic commerce and influencer marketing literature by extending the understanding of virtual influencer effectiveness in sustainable consumption contexts. Methodologically, the integration of symmetrical and asymmetrical analytical approaches provides a more comprehensive explanation of consumer decision-making in virtual influencer marketing environments. The findings also offer practical implications for marketers seeking to leverage virtual influencers to promote green consumption in digital commerce settings. Full article

In the context of deepening data assetization, this paper explores the strategic role of data assets in sustaining corporate competitiveness. Utilizing a dataset of China’s A-share listed companies from 2010 to 2023, we examine the influence of data assets on continuous innovation from a synergistic perspective of robust anchoring and dynamic reconstruction. The findings indicate that data assets can significantly empower continuous innovation, with the effect being more pronounced in specific contexts defined by ownership, regional marketization, the intensity of intellectual property protection, and market structure. In further analysis, we also found that this effect extends to green continuous innovation, offering more direct evidence for the sustainability implications of data-driven innovation. Crucially, our mechanism analysis reveals that data assets facilitate innovation through two pathways: (1) a “de-financialization” pathway, which reduces reliance on financial speculation and consolidates the real economy; and (2) a capability-building pathway, which enhances firms’ dynamic capabilities. These findings offer practical implications for policymakers and managers seeking to promote sustainable corporate growth, as they demonstrate that embedding innovation continuity into core strategies serves as a foundational driver of long-term environmental, social, and economic resilience. Full article

The growing importance of sustainable digital commerce has increased the need to understand how Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG)-related information communicated through digitally mediated environments influences consumer decision-making and value creation. This study investigates the effects of corporate ESG information and public ESG information on consumer awareness and subsequent behavioral responses, including purchase intention, investment intention, advocacy, and positive perceptions toward ESG-oriented companies. Drawing on Stakeholder Theory and the theory of planned behavior, the study examines how different sources of ESG information shape consumer evaluations and intentions in an increasingly information-driven marketplace. Using partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM), data from 1836 respondents obtained from the Korea Consumer Agency’s national consumer survey were analyzed. The results indicate that corporate ESG information significantly enhanced consumer awareness, whereas public ESG information did not have a significant effect on consumer awareness. Public ESG information significantly strengthened positive perceptions but did not significantly influence advocacy. Consumer awareness emerged as the strongest predictor of purchase intention, investment intention, advocacy, and positive perception. It significantly mediated the relationships between corporate ESG information and consumer responses, whereas no significant indirect effects were observed for public ESG information. However, corporate ESG information did not directly increase purchase intention or investment intention, suggesting that awareness represents the primary mechanism through which ESG communication influences consumer responses. These findings contribute to the literature on sustainable digital commerce by demonstrating that ESG information functions as a strategic market signal that promotes consumer engagement and sustainable value creation through awareness. The study further provides practical implications for firms and policymakers seeking to develop credible ESG communication strategies that support the green transition and foster sustainable consumer decision-making. Full article

Carbon emissions trading market is an important institutional innovation to promote green and low-carbon transformation of economic development and sustainable economic and social development. With the quasi-natural experiment of China’s carbon emissions trading pilot policy since 2013, this paper constructs a multi-period double-difference model based on the panel data of 30 provinces and systematically evaluates the effectiveness as well as the heterogeneous performance of the carbon emissions trading policy on carbon emissions. The results show that the implementation of carbon emissions trading policy significantly reduces regional carbon emissions, with a significant impact coefficient of −0.1701 at the 1% level, and the finding passes a series of robustness tests. Heterogeneity analysis shows that the impact effect of carbon emissions trading policies is more significant in the eastern and central regions and more significant in regions with high levels of human capital. Mechanism analysis indicates that the carbon emissions trading policies achieve carbon emission reduction through the market mechanism and government intervention mechanism, and promote regional investment in scientific and technological innovation, reduce the total amount of energy consumption, and optimize the structure of energy consumption. Further analysis indicates that the carbon trading policy exerts a significant spatial spillover effect on carbon emission reduction. Full article

Environmental, social, and governance (ESG) considerations and sovereign credit risk have reshaped how bank-level risk is understood in emerging markets. This paper examines the determinants of idiosyncratic volatility (IVOL) in Halkbank, the Turkish state-owned commercial bank with the highest public float. Using quarterly data from 2009Q1 to 2024Q3, we isolate IVOL from a Fama–French five-factor model constructed for Halkbank and estimate a two-regime Markov switching regression (MSR), with a dynamic ordinary least squares (DOLS) model as a robustness check. Sovereign credit default swap (CDS) spreads are positively associated with IVOL, and the association is larger in the high-volatility regime. ESG performance is negatively associated with IVOL, and this association is also stronger in the high-volatility regime. Wald tests confirm that both the CDS and ESG coefficients differ significantly across regimes, indicating that the relationships are state-dependent rather than constant. Bank-specific fundamentals and macroeconomic indicators are not statistically significant once sovereign risk and ESG are included. A Hansen parameter-instability test supports a long-run cointegrating relationship, and the DOLS estimates are consistent with the MSR results. The findings have implications for risk management, investment, and supervision in bank settings characterised by state ownership and strong sovereign-bank linkages. Full article