How Does Firm-Level Economic Policy Uncertainty Affect Corporate Innovation? Evidence from China

Innovation is the main driving force of the sustainable development of enterprises. Economic policy uncertainty has increased dramatically in recent years due to events such as COVID-19, which will alter the business environment of enterprises and ultimately affect their innovation behavior. How economic policy uncertainty will affect corporate innovation has become a crucial topic, but empirical studies have not reached consistent conclusions, and few have noted the heterogeneity of different firms' perceptions of uncertainty. This study used a textual analysis approach to create firm-level economic policy uncertainty indicators from the texts of annual reports of Chinese A-share listed firms. Based on the effectiveness of our measure of economic policy uncertainty, we further examined its impact on firm innovation. We find that our uncertainty measure has negative effects on enterprise innovation activity, and this negative impact is more significant among non-state-owned enterprises, and firms with higher financial constraints and lower government subsidies. We extend the measurement of economic policy uncertainty from the micro level and provide some suggestions for policymakers at the macro level. In the period of increasing uncertainty in the external environment, the government should try to maintain the stability and transparency of economic policies, and provide more targeted policy support to enterprises, such as by broadening their financing channels and providing innovation subsidies. © 2023 by the authors.

The "Greenium” in Green Bonds: How Did It Change with COVID-19?

This paper focuses on the study of the "greenium”, i.e., the premium on Green Bonds (GBs) vs. Traditional Bonds (TBs) whereby investors accept lower yields of GBs vs. TBs, which is caused by the important difference between them with reference to their contribution to the green transition, specifically paying attention to the influence of the COVID-19 pandemic on it. The conjecture of this paper is that the negative shock of rates due to the pandemic crisis has increased the greenium, as it has also increased the interest in projects of the green transition. In addition, a hypothesis is made that the risk of breaking the green promises might be higher for corporations than for governments and, hence, that the greenium would be lower for corporate GBs than for government GBs. Finally, the possibility that the post-pandemic changes of the greenium might vary depending on individual GBs' liquidity is considered. The empirical analyses provide support for the first two hypotheses but not for the third one. © 2023 by the authors.

Systemic risk management in India: An analytics perspective

The rapid changes in socio-economic and environmental factors worldwide have resulted in natural and man-made disasters becoming increasingly difficult to manage. The emergence of systemic threats that are cross-border, complex, ambiguous, and uncertain in nature, such as the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, has made traditional risk management methods inadequate. Many countries, including India, are struggling to address the challenges posed by these systemic vulnerabilities, leading to unresolved policy and governance problems. This research emphasises the need for comprehensive and proactive risk management methods that can address the challenges posed by systemic vulnerabilities, rather than reactive and fragmented approaches. The research identifies crucial turning points in India's disaster management history and explores the prospects for improved disaster risk governance in the country. The report underlines good advances in disaster administration in India, but it also emphasises the need for more systemic development in overall disaster risk management. The research identifies key design principles for India's systemic risk management that can help improve disaster risk management. This understanding can aid in developing effective frameworks, policies, and strategies to control systemic disaster risks and align with major international objectives such as the Sustainable Development Goals and the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction. © 2023

Do Private Universities Achieve Financial Sustainability as a Result of Transformational Leadership

Against the backdrop of financial turbulence at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, this study examines the role of transformational leadership in leading private universities in Indonesia to achieve good financial sustainability. This study is the latest study that combines the indirect relationship of transformational leadership and financial sustainability using the mediation of accountability and transparency as part of good university governance. The study used a closed survey of 381 respondents in the financial sector from private universities in 10 provinces in Indonesia. Data processing and analysis using SPSS with various stages for an analysis endurance test. The results show that transformational leadership does not directly affect financial sustainability but through transparency and accountability. Another accepted hypothesis discusses the relationship of transformational leadership to the transparency and accountability of higher education institutions. The last accepted hypothesis is the direct relationship of the transparency variable to the financial sustainability and the accountability variable to the financial sustainability of private universities in Indonesia. Theoretical and practical recommendations are discussed densely in the discussion of this research. © 2022 WITPress. All rights reserved.

A Systematic Literature Review on ESG during the COVID-19 Pandemic

Environmental, social and governance (ESG) issues have been investigated by scholars from several points of view. Although the epidemic of COVID-19 is recent, numerous scholars have analyzed its effects on ESG, making it difficult to systematize current knowledge. This generates the risk that the discussion will become stale. This study aims to provide a systematic literature review able to examine the combination of ESG and COVID-19 outbreak, to understand what the academics discovered. Eighty-five studies were systematically reviewed. We used a systematic literature review which is the tool that can ensure that all relevant data from the topic under investigation are considered. This approach is considered as the most comprehensive and rigorous one because it allows the creation of the advancement of knowledge of the specific topic. We identified five classes plus a residual one that accommodate the main topics analyzed in the literature (investment and stock returns, ESG in specific industries, ESG rating, gender studies, ESG reporting, and other). Our research highlights that most of the studies have been focused on the first three topics, sometimes reaching different or opposite findings, while only few studies have been dedicated on the other topics. Therefore, we state the need for more research into the ESG/COVID-19 combination in the fields of gender diversity and ESG reporting, and for more research able to understand the different findings of the other three identified topics. © 2023 by the authors.

The Value of Internal Control during a Crisis: Evidence from Enterprise Resilience

Internal control is an important internal governance mechanism of enterprises and plays an important role in preventing and controlling corporate risks. This paper utilizes COVID-19 shocks and uses data from listed companies in China for 2019–2021 in order to study the impact of internal control on enterprise resilience and its functioning mechanism. The findings show that internal control significantly improves enterprise resilience during a crisis. By using firm characteristic quantile regressions, it is found that under a crisis, larger firms with sufficient cash flow from operating activities are more protected by internal control and more resilient. Mechanistic analysis suggests that internal control further increases enterprise resilience by improving resource allocation efficiency, reducing operating risk, and increasing innovation output. Further analysis shows that government support can enhance the resilience of firms during crises through tax and fiscal policies;a better business environment enhances firms' ability to withstand risks in crisis situations and helps them gain a competitive advantage in crisis situations. Based on this, this paper provides empirical evidence for revising and improving the internal control system of enterprises to reduce the negative impact of public health emergencies in the context of epidemics. © 2022 by the authors.

Exploring customer concerns on service quality under the COVID-19 crisis: A social media analytics study from the retail industry

The COVID-19 pandemic has triggered a set of government policies and supermarket regulations, which affects customers' grocery shopping behaviours. However, the specific impact of COVID-19 on retailers at the customer end has not yet been addressed. Using text-mining techniques (i.e., sentiment analysis, topic modelling) and time series analysis, we analyse 161,921 tweets from leading UK supermarkets during the first COVID-19 lockdown. The results show the causes of sentiment change in each time series and how customer perception changes according to supermarkets' response actions. Drawing on the social media crisis communication framework and Situational Crisis Communication theory, this study investigates whether responding to a crisis helps retail managers better understand their customers. The results uncover that customers experiencing certain social media interactions may evaluate attributes differently, resulting in varying levels of customer information collection, and grocery companies could benefit from engaging in social media crisis communication with customers. As new variants of COVID-19 keep appearing, emerging managerial problems put businesses at risk for the next crisis. Based on the results of text-mining analysis of consumer perceptions, this study identifies emerging topics in the UK grocery sector in the context of COVID-19 crisis communication and develop the sub-dimensions of service quality assessment into four categories: physical aspects, reliability, personal interaction, and policies. This study reveals how supermarkets could use social media data to better analyse customer behaviour during a pandemic and sustain competitiveness by upgrading their crisis strategies and service provision. It also sheds light on how future researchers can leverage the power of social media data with multiple text-mining methodologies. © 2022 The Authors

Banking infrastructure and the Paycheck Protection Program during the Covid-19 pandemic

In response to the Covid-19 pandemic, the US federal government distributed US$800 billion in Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) loans to small businesses to preserve employment. Since PPP funding was transmitted through private banks, the characteristics of the regional banking market may have unevenly affected the programme's reach. This paper examines how variations in market concentration and the presence of community banks contributed to PPP disbursement in US counties. It finds that greater regional banking market concentration correlates with fewer PPP loans, but this negative relationship is mitigated by a greater presence of community banks in highly concentrated markets. © 2022 Regional Studies Association.

Are government bonds still safe havens in the context of COVID-19?

This study analyzes whether government bonds can act as safe havens in the context of COVID-19. Using a panel fixed effect model, data were collected for both advanced and emerging market economies from March 11, 2020, to June 30, 2021. Robustness tests were used to add to the credibility of the findings. Our evidence supports that government bonds maintained their safe haven status during the COVID-19 pandemic. Hence, investors can still use government bonds to hedge financial market risks in the uncertain environment associated with this pandemic. Additionally, the negative effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on government bond yields in emerging economies are larger than in advanced economies. Therefore, policymakers' measures should focus on reducing COVID-19 cases to alleviate panic and diminish economic fluctuations, especially for emerging economies. Regulators can also use short-term interest rates to guide market capital flow to avoid a liquidity crisis, reducing financial stress and market uncertainty. © 2021 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

Re-Adaptation of COVID-19 Impact for Sustainable Improvement of Indonesian Villages' Social Resilience in the Digital Era

The policy article aims to formulate a re-adaptation to the impact of COVID-19 that strengthens the social resilience of villages in a sustainable manner based on empirical findings. This article uses a sequential mixed model research design approach analysis with focus group discussion, and it is strengthened by data collected from 105 respondents chosen through random sampling techniques, online in-depth interviews, and group interviews in the villages where the article was conducted. The result showed that the village government was able to build a dialogue with villagers to find common understanding and build collective action to overcome the impact of COVID-19. Another finding is that the village government can realize real action in synergizing social protection policies from the government with the development of social security in rural communities. It was concluded that the experience of overcoming the impact of COVID-19 should be used as an innovation in the development mechanism of village governments in Indonesia. The innovation described in this article is known as re-adaptation. Disaster adaptation is designed and included in the village government's development planning mechanism document. The article has limitations because it does not examine existing regulations that could be used to expand innovative practices. © 2022 WITPress. All rights reserved.