Role of corporate sustainability disclosures in moderating the impact of country-level uncertainties on tourism sector firms' risk

The study investigates the role of corporate sustainability disclosures in moderating the link between country-level uncertainties (economic policy uncertainty, political uncertainty and uncertainty due to climate change) and firms' risks (total risk, market risk, and default risk) in the worldwide tourism firms. We consider the volume of ESG (environmental, social and governance) activities disclosures by the firms as a proxy of corporate sustainability disclosures. The study also explores the link between sustainability disclosures and firms' risks to validate the risk-reduction hypothesis. The study further highlights the relevance of country-level uncertainties in increasing firms' risks. The findings indicate that corporate sustainability disclosures can assist in mitigating tourism firms' risks during periods of heightened country-level uncertainties. The study also documents the significance of sustainability disclosures in reducing the effect of uncertainties on tourism firms' risks during the COVID-19 period. The results validate the risk-reduction hypothesis indicating that firms' engagement in corporate sustainability practices facilitates risk mitigation efforts during periods of escalated external uncertainties. By demonstrating that firms that engage in sustainability practices and provide required disclosures are better equipped to manage risks during periods of increased uncertainty, the study provides valuable insights for industry stakeholders, including investors, policymakers, and firms themselves. [ FROM AUTHOR] Copyright of Journal of Sustainable Tourism is the property of Taylor & Francis Ltd and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full . (Copyright applies to all s.)

Determinants and Consequences of Risk Disclosure: Evidence from Chinese Stock Markets during the COVID-19 Pandemic

This study examines the determinants and consequences of firms' disclosures related to the COVID-19 pandemic in annual financial reports in China. First, we find that firms with high growth opportunity or low stock liquidity tended to disclose COVID-19 pandemic information to mitigate information asymmetry. Second, our results show that voluntary risk disclosure significantly decreased stock risks due to the reduction of information asymmetry. We further find that stock price crash risks decreased for firms that reported risk information compared with those that did not. Our results suggest that detailed voluntary risk disclosure is needed to mitigate stock risks, especially in extreme situations.

Role of Partial Credit Guarantee Scheme in Enabling Growth of SME

Despite their importance Small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) in Azerbaijan and in other developed and developing countries suffer from limited access to financing due to high costs of small-scale lending, information asymmetry, high risks attributed to SMEs and collateral requirements. Thus, the lack of SME access to finance is to the large extent the consequence of weaknesses in enabling environment for finance. Shortfall in enabling environment becomes major constraint for economic growth and diversification and/or causes regionally-unbalanced growth. These deficiencies motivate government to make policy interventions toward SME financing expansion. Largely interventions come in form of credit guarantee schemes (CGS), direct lending facilities and lending by state-owned financial institutions. In turn, partial credit guarantee schemes are considered as most market friendly intervention type. There are also notable examples when countries like South Korea employed PCG as countercyclical policy tool to face difficulties came from economic downturn. The diverse and resilient SME sector is the center piece of the Azerbaijan government's strategic agenda to diversify the economy away from oil. Credit Guarantee Schemes were introduced in Azerbaijan as a measure of Government to make financing accessible for SMEs and to reduce effect of negative impact of two recent major events: the drop in worldwide oil prices and COVID-19 pandemic. The objective of this paper is to review characteristics of Credit Guarantee Schemes and assess preliminary outcomes of Partial Credit Guarantee mechanism implementation in Azerbaijan. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

Allocating scarce resources in the presence of private information and heterogeneous favoritism

Motivated by the challenge of allocating scarce resources from the federal government to different states during the COVID-19 pandemic, this paper studies optimal schemes for allocating scarce resources to agents with private demand information under different favoritism structures. Through an investigation of a mechanism design model that aims to induce agents to report their demands truthfully, we find the following results. First, when the principal purely cares about social welfare and when the principal has sufficient resources to satisfy all agents' demands, we find that the optimal allocation scheme is efficient in the sense that it is identical to the optimal scheme for the "benchmark” case when favoritism differentials and information asymmetry are both absent. Second, when rationing is needed due to resource scarcity, we show that heterogeneity in "event-independent” favoritism across agents will cause the principal to allocate more resources to agents with larger favoritism and less resources to others, resulting in inefficient allocations. Third, when agents possess heterogeneous "event-specific” favoritism due to the existence of outside options, the resulting allocation may boost all agents' expected utilities, including those agents who do not have any outside option. Finally, we show that the "allocation distortion” caused by both information asymmetry and heterogeneous favoritism can be reduced when "positive externality” is present (i.e., allocating resources to one agent can benefit other agents). © 2023 Production and Operations Management Society.

Making better IS security investment decisions: discovering the cost of data breach announcements during the COVID-19 pandemic

PurposeStock price reactions have often been used to evaluate the cost of data breaches in the current information systems (IS) security literature. To further this line of research, this study examines the impact of data breaches on stock returns, information asymmetry and unsystematic firm risk in the context of COVID-19.Design/methodology/approachThis paper employs an event study methodology and examines data breach events released in public databases, spanning pre- and post-COVID settings. This study investigated 283 data breaches of the US publicly traded firms, and the economic cost was measured by cumulative abnormal returns (CARs), trading volume, bid-ask spread and unsystematic risk.FindingsThe authors observe that data breaches during the COVID pandemic make investors react more negatively to data breach announcements, as reflected in the significantly negative difference in CARs between breached firms before COVID and those after COVID. The findings also indicate that, after the disclosure of data breach incidents, information asymmetry is reduced to a lesser extent compared with that in the pre-COVID setting. The authors also find that data breach events lead to an increase in the unsystematic risk of breached companies in the pre-COVID era but no change in the post-COVID era.Originality/valueThis study is the first effort to examine the economic consequences of data breaches by investigating the effects in the form of trading activities and risk measurement in the COVID setting.

Essays on economic analysis of social interactions

Chapter 1:An Equilibrium Model of Traffic Accidents: from the Peltzman Effect on Autonomous Cars We propose a population game to analyze drivers' driving behavior. Each driver interacts with a myriad of other drivers in a strategic substitute fashion, namely other drivers' reckless behavior encourages me to drive more carefully. We establish a set of reasonable assumptions, under which this game admits a unique Nash Equilibrium. This allows us to analyze the question that Peltzman (1975) raised: If the driving environment improves, drivers respond by driving more incautiously. Can this reaction lead to more auto accidents? To this end, we derive a sufficient condition that rules out this possibility. We then justify this sufficient condition using an empirical regularity we discover from data regarding mutual accidents between different groups of drivers. Throughout the analysis, we provide a definition of potential games for a continuum of players, where the interaction term depends also on their types. Also, the comparative statics result we produced, can be applied to a range of games with strategic substitutesChapter 2: Information Asymmetry in an Epidemic: A Game Theoretical Analysis of Communication Failure In an epidemic, individuals reduce social activities to protect themselves from getting infected. This also protects others from potential infections, but utility-maximizing individuals do not consider this spillover effect. Consequently, individuals choose a social activity that is higher than the regulator's preferred social optimum. When facing a novel disease such as COVID-19, the public often lacks knowledge of certain disease attributes such as the pass-through rate, the mortality rate, the number of current infections, etc. On the other hand, the regulator is often better informed. We build a game theoretic model to study how the regulator strategically communicates to the public, in the presence of misaligned incentives caused by the spillover effect. When the public uncertainty is large and the disease reproduction rate is high, the regulator loses credibility, and cannot reveal any information to the public. Communication failure can lead to the public under (or over) reactions. Compartmental models that overlook this information friction can significantly under-estimate the future infection rate. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved)

Sustained Improvement of Educational Information Asymmetry: Intentions to Use School Social Media

Under the impact of digitization, many schools in Taiwan have started to actively operate social media. Using social media to release important school information can reduce the educational information asymmetry between schools and students. Educational information asymmetry may cause problems of adverse selection and moral hazard, and damage the rights and interests of students. The main purpose of this study is to explore the intentions of high school students to use school social media as a channel to obtain important information about their schools. A questionnaire survey was administered to the students of a high school in Taoyuan City, Taiwan, and the collected data were statistically analyzed. The research results of this study show that perceived usefulness, subjective norm, and trust had positively significant effects on the intention to use school social media;however, perceived ease-of-use, and perceived behavioral control did not have significant effects on the intention to use school social media. Through the operation of social media, schools can not only eliminate the adverse selection and moral hazard caused by information asymmetry but also improve their brand images and reduce their marketing costs.

Weibo users and Academia's foci on tourism safety: Implications from institutional differences and digital divide.

Tourism safety is essential for tourists and tourism practitioners. This study conducted a bibliometric analysis using VOSviewer and CiteSpace for 2018 articles indexed on the Web of Science (WoS). It also analysed 7293 Weibo posts between 1977 and 2022 using Python, MYSQL, AI sentiment, and Tableau. The first tourism safety publication on WoS appeared in 1977, while the first Weibo microblog dated was dated back to 2011. Compared to the information posted on Weibo, the annual publications about tourism safety on WoS recorded a stable increment. On Web of Science (WoS), the academic staff and universities produced the largest number of tourism safety posts. On the flip side, the most productive organisations on Weibo are government agencies in popular tourism destinations. "Accident", "medical tourism", "environment", "mediating role", and "hospitality" were important burst nodes in tourism safety on WoS. "Quality", "accident", and health-related words were the foci on both Weibo and WoS. On Web of Science, the top 10 most popular keywords of tourism safety-related articles could be classified into two groups: health ("Covid-19", "restoration", "pandemics", "Sars-Cov-2", "Sars", "mental health") and IT terminologies ("big data", "artificial intelligence"). It has been concluded that "artificial intelligence (AI)" is more likely to be included in the keywords on tourism researched by academia. In contrast, the public may not know about or use AI in the tourism industry. Besides, the top 10 most popular keywords on Weibo related to tourism risks and hazards were drowning and traffic risks and hazards, such as drowning and traffic risks. The digital divide may explain such a difference: the academic circle benefits more from the digital age than laypersons. It may also be the result of institutional differences and information asymmetry.

Responding to information asymmetry in crisis situations: innovation in the time of the COVID-19 pandemic

Crises test the resilience of public service organizations. Healthcare providers must respond and innovate within tight constraints to address challenges. Presenting COVID-19 as a knowable unknown (black swan event), we adopt information processing theory to investigate how healthcare providers and their suppliers address information asymmetry to support decision-making. Building on primary and secondary datasets, we demonstrate managers were innovating internal structural responses. For black swan events, in-house ‘intelligent clients' are intrinsic not only in managing information uncertainty associated with early stages of the crisis, but also in addressing information equivocality and joint decision-making with other organizations associated with implementing solutions. © 2021 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

Analysis of COVID-19 rapid antigen and PCR detection policy

After the outbreak of COVID-19, Taiwan has implemented rigorous border control and taken specific measures such as virus detection, contact tracing, and quarantine since 2020. Its epidemic prevention performance has been quite outstanding. Even in May 2021, when the epidemic situation worsens, the people in Taiwan fully cooperate with the government's control measures so as to successfully alleviate and control the epidemic in less than three months. Among them, the detection policy has played a pivotal role. We analyze and discuss the false positive and false negative problems from rapid antigen and PCR detection in the screening policy as well as the timing of using these two instruments. This paper provides theoretical verification of the appropriateness of screening policy in Taiwan, offering a few feasible suggestions for related policies in other countries or regions at different stages of this and other potential epidemics. (c) 2022 by the authors;licensee Growing Science, Canada.

Analysis and impact of COVID-19 disclosures: is IT-services different from others?

Purpose>There is ambiguity regarding whether coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is a boon or bane for the IT services industry. On the one hand, it has created opportunities, especially with the growth of collaborative technologies. On the other hand, many firms have reduced their IT budgets owing to the ongoing recession. This study explores how IT firms have assessed the risk of the pandemic in the early days and informed capital market participants. In addition, it examines the impact of such online disclosures on information asymmetry.Design/methodology/approach>The authors analysed annual reports of publicly listed firms in the USA filed on the Securities and Exchange Commission website in 2020 and examined whether the disclosure scenario of technology firms was different from that of the other industries. Moreover, the risk sentiment of COVID-19-related disclosures was assessed by employing text analytics. Information asymmetry was measured using the bid–ask spread.Findings>Overall, it was found that IT services firms were less likely to discuss the COVID-19 pandemic in their annual reports. Interestingly, it was observed that technology firms that chose to communicate about the pandemic had a lower incidence of words related to risks. Furthermore, communicating about COVID-19 in annual reports calms investors and improves the information asymmetry situation about the firm. Variation in the severity of the pandemic and the responses of state governments was controlled for by employing state-fixed effects in the empirical models.Originality/value>The authors inform the literature on corporate disclosures and technology and highlight the importance of effectively communicating about the pandemic.

Shaping the Perceptions of Fashion Consumers by Influencers on Digital Platforms in the Era of COVID-19

The recent outbreak of COVID-19 is taking the fashion industry through a challenging period. The industry's activities are now being more facilitated by digital platforms/influencers in the dispensation of products than ever before. This study seeks to investigate digital platforms/influencers in developing countries and their impact on the fashion industry. The study also explores the challenges of information asymmetry online, drawing on the lemon market theory (LMT), as the theoretical lens. Qualitative data was collected from twenty-two respondents;the research findings indicate that the use of digital platforms/influencers is essential in reaching the industry's vital consumers. Also, information asymmetry is the greatest challenge as far as e-business is concerned.-The contribution of this study reposes the use of LMT to determine how information asymmetry is leveraged. In terms of the policy, this research provides strategies for discussions on security and trust for policymakers to secure payment and delivery in e-business. Copyright © 2022, IGI Global.

Tackling false advertising and strengthening consumer protection in emerging economies

False advertising has many negative consequences for the protection of consumer rights and wellbeing. In emerging economies in particular, false advertising has been widespread across business sectors and products due to inadequate public policy and ineffective law enforcement. Since the COVID-19 global pandemic has spread around the world, people have become more dependent on e-commerce for purchasing goods and services, and the negative impact has become historically high with increasing number of advertising and sales cyber-fakes However, prior studies have not focused on consumers' perceived deception and information asymmetry in false advertising in general, and the consequent implications for public policy in controlling and eliminating such problems, specifically in emerging economies. This study focuses on the example of China as a leading emerging economy to investigate the relevant issues and contribute to extant knowledge by linking separate paradigms with a new holistic conceptual framework that identifies the key elements of contextual factors, consumers' perceived deception and information asymmetry, the causes and impacts, and the expected policy implications for further prevention.

Construction of Cross-Border Food Supply Chain Information Sharing Platform Based on Blockchain Under COVID-19

The pandemic of the COVID-19 has caused many problems in the cross-border food supply chain during transportation, such as food safety is difficult to guarantee due to the infection of people or environmental epidemics, information asymmetry and difficult to share in the food supply chain, and food related information is tampered with and difficult to trace during transportation. The emergence of blockchain technology has brought new solutions to the above problems. Based on the relevant functions and characteristics of the blockchain, this paper constructs a cross-border food supply chain information sharing platform under the blockchain technology, such as using smart contracts to monitor the epidemic security risk in the transportation process of the supply chain, using hash functions and tamper proof features to deal with food information fraud, and using the distributed and decentralized characteristics of the blockchain to solve the sharing problem of information asymmetry;The time stamp in the blockchain is used to trace the information of each link node of food and the initial node for accountability. In this paper, the construction process of the platform is described in detail from the perspective of model, function and subject, and the specific process of the platform is described in detail from the perspective of information storage, information sharing and information traceability. In this paper, the emerging blockchain technology is applied to all links of the food supply chain, and considering the current epidemic problems, the platform can bring new ideas to solve the problems of cross-border food transportation during the epidemic, and has certain theoretical value. © 2022 Association for Computing Machinery.

Essays on economic analysis of social interactions

Chapter 1:An Equilibrium Model of Traffic Accidents: from the Peltzman Effect on Autonomous Cars We propose a population game to analyze drivers' driving behavior. Each driver interacts with a myriad of other drivers in a strategic substitute fashion, namely other drivers' reckless behavior encourages me to drive more carefully. We establish a set of reasonable assumptions, under which this game admits a unique Nash Equilibrium. This allows us to analyze the question that Peltzman (1975) raised: If the driving environment improves, drivers respond by driving more incautiously. Can this reaction lead to more auto accidents? To this end, we derive a sufficient condition that rules out this possibility. We then justify this sufficient condition using an empirical regularity we discover from data regarding mutual accidents between different groups of drivers. Throughout the analysis, we provide a definition of potential games for a continuum of players, where the interaction term depends also on their types. Also, the comparative statics result we produced, can be applied to a range of games with strategic substitutesChapter 2: Information Asymmetry in an Epidemic: A Game Theoretical Analysis of Communication Failure In an epidemic, individuals reduce social activities to protect themselves from getting infected. This also protects others from potential infections, but utility-maximizing individuals do not consider this spillover effect. Consequently, individuals choose a social activity that is higher than the regulator's preferred social optimum. When facing a novel disease such as COVID-19, the public often lacks knowledge of certain disease attributes such as the pass-through rate, the mortality rate, the number of current infections, etc. On the other hand, the regulator is often better informed. We build a game theoretic model to study how the regulator strategically communicates to the public, in the presence of misaligned incentives caused by the spillover effect. When the public uncertainty is large and the disease reproduction rate is high, the regulator loses credibility, and cannot reveal any information to the public. Communication failure can lead to the public under (or over) reactions. Compartmental models that overlook this information friction can significantly under-estimate the future infection rate. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved)

Companies' behavior in measuring the quality of financial reports: Pre- and post-pandemic research.

Since information is the foundation for decision-making by its users, it and the quality associated with it must be given particular importance in order to reduce uncertainties about how it is reported and interpreted and to increase its usefulness. Financial reporting is of relatively great significance to both those who provide it and those who use it, with accounting providing a wide range of sources of financial information, ensuring a high degree of credibility compared to other sources of information. The objective of the research is to highlight the behavior of companies in measuring the quality of issuers' financial reporting to identify solutions for harmonizing the way financial information is presented with the needs of users. Two hypotheses were defined and tested for this purpose, with the research being segmented over three successive stages. The first stage consists in identifying the appropriate index to measure the quality of financial reporting. The second stage consists in gathering the data and obtaining the quality measurements, for testing the defined hypotheses. The third stage concerns in concluding the results obtained highlight the existing divergences between the period before the health crisis, but also the period immediately after the COVID-19, on the two markets of the Bucharest Stock Exchange (regulated market and AeRO market).

State ownership, information asymmetry and cash holding: Impact of COVID-19 on Chinese-listed firms.

This study investigates the relationship between information asymmetry and cash holdings under the impact of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) in China. It likewise explores how state ownership dominates their nexus, particularly during the pandemic. COVID-19 caused increases in cash holdings, and that the information asymmetry's effect on cash holdings is more pronounced over the COVID-19 period. Additionally, information asymmetry has a weaker effect on corporate cash holdings for state-owned enterprises (SOEs) under the pandemic. Overall, the study shows that state ownership moderates information asymmetry's impact on cash holdings and softens firms' precautionary motive for cash holdings during the pandemic.

Analyst Site Visits and Corporate Environmental Information Disclosure: Evidence from China.

Compared with developed countries, emerging economy countries are facing more severe environmental challenges. Therefore, effective disclosure of corporate environmental information is an important concern for emerging economies to cope with environmental issues. There is a growing volume of literature documenting that analyst site visits can urge corporations to provide high-quality financial information to investors. However, whether analyst site visits can also improve the quality of environmental information is still unclear. In the Chinese setting, where environmental information has attracted much attention, we explore the interaction between analyst site visits and environmental information disclosure. With three regression methods of the ordinary least squares model, two-stage least square model, and difference-in-difference model, we establish regressions to verify the relationships between them by using empirical data from 2012 to 2019 in China. The results show that analyst site visits are significantly positively correlated with corporate environmental information disclosure. This positive relation is more pronounced when corporations are in economically developed and highly market-oriented areas, in poor air quality areas, and for corporations with good, reasonable internal governance. In addition, we find that analyst site visits affect the quality of environmental information disclosure through the intermediary effect of media attention. In the robustness test, further evidence also indicates that the interaction between analyst site visits and corporate environmental information disclosure was more significant before the COVID-19 lockdown policy was implemented in Wuhan. Our findings suggest that governments should provide support for analysts to conduct site visits and formulate regulations on mandatory disclosure of environmental information by different regions as soon as possible.

Biotechnology firms, signals, and venture capital investment

Purpose: Biotechnology has gained such prominence in the past years that approximately 50% of new drugs developed worldwide are of biotechnological origin. Some of the Covid-19 vaccines are a good example of this development. However, biotechnology R&D projects are characterized by high costs, prolonged development times, and a high degree of uncertainty and failure. Only few types of financial agents undertake such risky investments, among which are venture capital firms. In this paper, we analyse the signals that influence suchlike venture capital investment decisions. The very high level of risk, which differentiates biotechnology firms from other technology companies, justifies an analysis focused solely on biotechnology firms.Design/methodology: Hypotheses about the effectiveness of these signals are validated by means of a probit regression with panel data on a sample of 210 biotechnology companies established in Spain over a ten-year period.Findings: A positive and negative signalling effect has been found for some of the phenomena analysed, which validate the proposed model.Research limitations/implications: A convenience sample has been used for methodological reasons. Some phenomena that could have some effect on the venture capital investment decisions have not been possible to observe.Practical implications: It can be crucial for biotechnology firms for their managers to know which characteristics make these firms attractive to venture capital firms. Additionally, it is important to be aware of signals that, instead of favouring investment decisions, deter them.Originality/value: This is the first study conducted for the Spanish industry to focus on the first venture capital investment - rather than the typical focus on the amount invested-as an event that mitigates the information asymmetry level, and which includes also a distinction between four types of strategic alliance, the use of a probit regression with panel data, and a quantitative analysis on the biotech industry.As the Spanish biotechnology and venture capital industries differ from those established in other European countries, this work offers new elements of analysis, description, and comparison of these industries. In addition, the construction of a database on a sample of 210 Spanish biotechnology firms is unprecedented and can be used for future research.

Analysis of a maritime transport chain with information asymmetry and disruption risk.

Maritime transport chain is facing huge information asymmetry after the outbreak of major emergencies, such as COVID-19 epidemic. The previous literature has proved that information investing and information sharing are two effective tactics to relieve information asymmetry between supply chain nodes, and help them improve the performance of the supply chain. This paper assumes random demand disruption is the main cause of the information asymmetry in a maritime transportation chain. To explore how the random demand disruption and channel competition jointly impact operational decisions in a dual-channel maritime transport chain composed of one port, two carriers and shippers, we construct a game-theoretical basic model, and proposed two strategies, i.e., information investing and information sharing. Several significant managerial insights are derived. First, we find that inaccurate disruption information leads to inaccurate decisions and huge losses; Second, investing in precise information benefits the port only if the chain members are optimistic about the market, and improves the revenue of the carrier who invested in information if the investment cost is reasonable; Third, accepting information sharing benefits the port only when the precise disruption and the distortion of information are relatively large, as well as the misappropriate rate is relatively small; and only when the port is pessimistic about the market or the channel competition is weak, sharing information may hurt the carrier who invested in information. Finally, the strength of the channel competition will enhance the impact of information inaccuracy on the maritime transport chain.