The Canadian University Dubai, popularly known as CUD, is a private university in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, founded in 2006. The Canadian University Dubai offers education based on the Canadian curriculum. The university has recently opened a new state of the art campus located in the heart of Dubai, in City Walk.The university was originally known as Centennial University of Dubai. This title was changed to Canadian University Dubai once it became an independent Canadian institution. The university maintains its ties with the original Ontario-based Centennial College, offering students transfer programs after their second year.
Empowering females and enhancing their representation in leadership roles are critical components of sustainable development. This study uniquely explores how female directors with Non-Governmental Organization (NGO) backgrounds influence the relationship between Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) practices and firm performance in Malaysia, through the lens of feminist theory. Utilizing comprehensive data from 398 firm-year observations across various sectors from 2018 to 2021, the study employs advanced econometric techniques, including the Durbin-Watson test for autocorrelation, Propensity Score Matching (PSM) to mitigate selection bias, and Generalized Least Squares (GLS) to ensure robust estimation. The findings highlight that female directors with NGO experience significantly strengthen ESG integration within firms, particularly by enhancing the social dimension through improved stakeholder engagement, transparency, and ethical governance. This distinctive influence notably translates into enhanced corporate performance, closely aligning corporate strategies with broader sustainability goals. By linking feminist empowerment principles to corporate governance, female NGO directors effectively bridge civic engagement with strategic business decision-making processes. This study offers valuable insights for organizations and policymakers aiming to integrate gender diversity and NGO expertise into corporate governance frameworks, promoting sustainable, inclusive, and equitable business practices.
Purpose The integration of artificial intelligence (AI) into tourism offers transformative potential for advancing sustainable tourism development (STD). Despite growing interest in AI applications in tourism, existing literature lacks a theoretically grounded and empirically validated framework that links AI with sustainable empowerment strategies and tourist engagement (TE) as pathways to STD. To address this gap, the study aims to draw on the Value-Attitude-Behaviour (VAB) and Empowerment theories to conceptualise and validate a structural model to explain the relational dynamics between AI and STD. Design/methodology/approach Primary data were collected from 303 domestic and international tourists in the Hail region of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia using a two-wave time-lagged survey. Quantitative methodology was used to analyse the hypothesised relationships. Findings Findings reveal that AI significantly enhances sustainable psychological, social and political empowerment, which in turn positively influences TE. Furthermore, TE serves as a strong predictor of STD, highlighting the crucial role of empowerment and engagement in translating AI capabilities into sustainable outcomes. Originality/value The study contributes to tourism literature by offering a novel theory-driven framework that explicates the mechanism through which AI drives STD.
Corporate social responsibility (CSR) is widely promoted as a driver of firm performance, but empirical evidence remains inconsistent, particularly in emerging markets where institutional structures are still evolving. This study examines whether CSR creates firm value conditionally rather than uniformly, by analysing its nonlinear relationship with performance and the role of CEO financial expertise in shaping this linkage. Using panel data from the 100 largest firms listed in Vietnam between 2019 and 2024, we construct a disclosure-based CSR index and estimate dynamic panel models using the Difference Generalized Method of Moments to address endogeneity. The results reveal a robust inverted U-shaped relationship between CSR and firm performance, indicating that CSR enhances returns only up to an optimal level, beyond which additional engagement becomes value-reducing. Moreover, CEO financial expertise exhibits a dual effect. While it is associated with lower short-term profitability, it strengthens the marginal effectiveness of CSR by improving the allocation, evaluation, and strategic integration of social investments. This finding suggests that CSR does not function as a value-creating resource in itself but becomes one when filtered through managerial capability. By integrating stakeholder theory, the resource-based view, and upper echelons theory, this study reframes the CSR-performance relationship as contingent on managerial expertise rather than universally beneficial. The findings highlight the importance of aligning CSR intensity with firm capabilities and underscore the role of financially trained executives in converting CSR from symbolic compliance into economically meaningful strategy, particularly in emerging market contexts.
Retailers increasingly need decision-support tools to manage unsold inventory under operational and fiscal constraints. In this paper, we develop a reverse supply chain (RSC) model for reailers under profit-loss budgetary limitation. The retail RSC cossts of multiple stores, a warehous, and multiple vendors. Each stre carrieinventory that is not selling as hoped, and they want to get rid of these unwnted products to replace the spae with more productive items. Our model considers two optios for how a sore can get rid of tese prducts: the reailer casend the products to its warehose if there is emand at othestores, or send thm back to their vendor if there are available vendor funds. Hwever, the retailer perates under a predeermined prfit-loss buget that should be utlized as closely s possible within tfiscl cycle. The budgetary limitation is the result of profit-loss that will be incurred due to relocting products within and out of its supply chain system. This budgetary limittion, also known s the "P&L effect" in industry, is decided a year prior to an RSC activity for finacial, planning, and/or taxation reasons. We mdl this problem as a mxed integer lineprogrm and solve teproblems using CPLEX. We then develop a huristic solution algorithand compre the CPLEX solution results and tims with our heuristic. We summaize useful insighs into our heuristic and how it can be further developd for similar optimization prblems with budgetary constraints. Eventually, we outline future reearch opics and suggestions for RSC mods for retailers.
