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This paper aims to investigate the relationship between board composition and firm corporate social responsibility (CSR) scores of the top 30 listed companies in Australia, France, UK and USA.

Using a sample of 120 publicly listed companies covering a 10-year period from 2006 to 2015, the authors examine this relationship in a dynamic modelling framework, which controls for potential sources of endogeneity.

The authors find that board composition appears to have no effect on large firms’ CSR scores. This finding remains robust when they used out-of-sample analysis and is consistent with the perspectives of agency theory stakeholder theory and institutional theory.

This study contributes to the literature in several ways. First, it fills an important gap in literature on CSR and corporate governance, as less is known about how board composition affects social activities. Second, this study controls endogeneity and sample selection bias which are main econometric problems in CG and CSR studies.

This study investigates the impact of temporary employment on various forms of financial distress for firms during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The authors apply a logit model to evaluate the differences in the probabilities of experiencing financial distress for firms with or without temporary reemployment and for firms with different intensities of temporary workers. As an additional test, an ordinal logistic model is applied to reflect different degrees of financial distress.

Our main results indicate that firms with temporary employment are more likely to experience financial distress than firms without temporary employment, regardless of the severity of financial distress. Among firms with temporary employment, our analysis suggests that a firm’s likelihood of experiencing financial distress depends on its relative share (quantile) of temporary workers.

Our findings provide valuable insights for evaluating the impact of temporary employment on firms’ vulnerability during the COVID-19 crisis and suggest strategies for firms to enhance resilience to similar future crises.

Our study is the first one that explores the relationship between temporary employment and financial distress. Firms around the world have been pursuing flexible labor to improve resilience and firm performance. The pandemic may further ramify this trend, creating a future “new normal” regarding employment relationships, job segmentation and gender equality in the job market. This article adds a new dimension to the evaluation of the new normal, which may help firms evaluate the consequences of temporary employment, especially in times of crisis.

This paper aims to examine the association between environmental disclosure and waste performance.

This study is based on a sample of S&P 500 firms over a nine-year period from 2010 to 2018. The pooled ordinary least squares (OLS), logistic, propensity score matching (PSM) and instrumental variable-generalized method of moments regressions analyses have been used to examine the data.

The findings show a significant positive relationship between waste performance and environmental disclosure, suggesting that firms with superior waste performance tend to disclose more environmental information. Further, the authors distinguish between “hard” and “soft” environmental disclosures and find that the effect of waste performance is consistently positive and significant for each type. The observed positive and significant association of waste performance with environmental disclosure remains unchanged, regardless of the industry affiliation of firms, although firms from industries that are less environmentally sensitive provide a slightly higher level of environmental disclosure. The authors also explore possible channels that may explain the association between waste performance and environmental disclosure and find that litigation risk and cash holdings positively moderate the association. The finding remains robust to a number of alternative estimation approaches.

Overall, the authors present important evidence that waste performance is an important indicator of environmental disclosure. The findings are useful for corporations and stakeholders and have important implications around the globe as the authors continue to grapple with the ongoing issue of waste.

This study investigates whether there is an association between business symbiosis and the performance of micro, small and medium enterprises (MSMEs).

The authors conducted 200 surveys, using ordered logistic regression to evaluate the results. Participants are MSME business owners in Cambridge, New Zealand.

The authors found that connections with banks and other businesses in the same and across different industries, positively associates with changes in MSME profitability. Additionally, operating a business as a franchisee under the regulations or headquarter issued rules is positively associated with change in net profit.

While there are limitations with cross-sectional data, the study indicates a mechanism and frameworks for policy analysis when deciding on allocation of funds to particular networks.

The purpose of this paper is to use a panel of New Zealand unlisted firms from 1998 to 2009 to examine the relationship between ownership structure and firm leverage ratios. Although, the choice of the debt in capital structure is important for all firms, the scale effects may influence the degree of influence of particular financial theories upon capital structure.

To control the endogeneity effect of insider ownership, this study uses the dynamic panel generalised method of moment estimation and uses the Granger causality test to check the causality effect of leverage and insider ownership.

The findings suggest an inverse U-shape relationship of insider ownership and leverage, indicating higher insider ownership increases management entrenchment while lower insider ownership increases misalignment of the interests of management and owners. Moreover, this study finds bi-directional causation between insider ownership and firm leverage ratios.

Finance policy needs to vary across firm type, industries and firm characteristics and should match the different borrowing requirements of small business.

This paper contributes to literature by investigating whether the structure of equity ownership can impact cross-sectional variations in capital structure. Moreover, most of the capital structure research has been conducted in large markets like USA and publicly listed firms but this paper concentrates on the evidence from New Zealand unlisted businesses. Also, the econometric analysis is more robust due to controlling for the endogeneity effect of insider ownership.