This paper contributes to entrepreneurial history by addressing our limited micro-level understanding of how small, provincial cultural enterprises operated outside London in nineteenth-century Britain. While research on Victorian entrepreneurship and family business has focused largely on large manufacturers and metropolitan firms, far less is known about how entrepreneurial processes unfolded within small, local cultural enterprises. Using a microhistorical approach, the paper reconstructs the development of the Glasgow pianoforte business of James S. Kerr using census data, post office directories, newspapers, music publications, and probate records. The analysis traces the firm's evolution from piano tuning into retailing and music publishing and examines how entrepreneurial activity was enacted through skill recombination, diversification, and household-based organization. The study shows how a small provincial enterprise generated social mobility, expanded geographically, and created an enduring family business legacy despite operating within a fragmented and service-intensive market. By demonstrating how entrepreneurial processes can be reconstructed from non-financial archival sources, the paper highlights the importance of place, embeddedness, and small-scale enterprise in the Victorian cultural economy. More broadly, it illustrates how microhistorical analysis can enhance our understanding of entrepreneurship as a set of processes through which economic and social change was enacted over time.

PurposeThis paper aims to investigate the investment appraisal process of small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in Lebanon and examine how political risk and Islamic finance considerations impact the capital budgeting (CB) process.Design/methodology/approachThis paper conducts semi-structured interviews with senior executives of Lebanese SMEs to investigate their CB practices.FindingsThe results indicate that Lebanese SMEs place more emphasis on non-financial factors, such as political priorities and personal experience, than financial factors when analysing potential projects. Lebanese companies also use more than one method of investment appraisal, with payback being the most popular technique. Most interviewees indicated that their companies had experienced capital rationing and that it tended to be imposed externally. Political risk was consistently cited as a key determinant of project evaluation methods, while some respondents also acknowledged informal alignment with Islamic finance principles.Originality/valueThis paper contributes to the literature by examining whether capital investment appraisal techniques used in advanced Western economies are applicable in an emerging Middle Eastern context. It advances the understanding of how political risk and institutional fragility reshape CB behaviour among SMEs. The study also offers early evidence on how Islamic finance norms may inform investment decisions even in secular or mixed financial environments. Overall, it highlights the need for context-sensitive adaptations to conventional CB frameworks in high-risk, culturally embedded business environments.

This paper explores how ideas of judgement-at-death shaped the emergence of accounting. Using a macro-historical approach, it examines eschatological motifs across Egyptian, Zoroastrian, Jewish, and Christian traditions, with special attention to Irish high crosses. Themes such as weighing deeds, the “Book of Life”, and mediating figures reveal how accounting metaphors of balance, record-keeping, and interpretation were embedded in moral culture long before they became technical practices. By tracing this lineage, the study shows how spiritual metaphors of accountability helped frame enduring conceptions of ethical and financial responsibility.

Although a considerable number of empirical studies have been conducted in developed markets to examine dividend signaling effects, very few comparable studies have been carried out in the Saudi market context. This study deeply investigates how the Saudi exchange market may have reacted to dividend news during an eight-year study period from a total sample of 280 dividend announcements made by 99 Saudi-listed companies. Results demonstrate that a company’s share price reacts to the announcement of a cash dividend during the event window. Besides, findings reveal a significant positive reaction in the share price at the time of the announcement of an increase in the dividend payment level. Furthermore, results demonstrate that the abnormal return is negative but not significantly different from zero at the time of the announcement of a decrease in the dividend payment level. Likewise, findings show that the shareholders earn just normal returns on the announcement day and that the abnormal return is not statistically different from zero for the dividend, not change group. The findings suggest potential information leakage before dividend announcements, raising concerns about insider trading. This highlights the need for stronger regulatory oversight and stricter disclosure enforcement. Companies should also use alternative communication channels to improve transparency and consider corporate social responsibility initiatives to signal their quality to investors.

This paper uses microhistory to examine the origins of accounting education at the University of Dundee. It summarises the literature describing the development of UK accounting education, thereby providing the macrohistorical background. Both archival research and oral histories are used as a basis for this research. The microhistorical analysis examines the reasons behind the elevation of accounting to departmental status. This analysis is important since many Accountancy Departments were established in Scottish Universities at this time and so the findings have wider implications for the development of the discipline. The findings suggest that financial considerations and a growing respect for the discipline and part-time professional teaching staff contributed to the emergence of an Accountancy Department. At the same time, the professional body entry requirements changed and one Scottish university withdrew from its provision of professional accounting courses which created an opportunity for competitors to establish their own Accountancy Departments.

One of the biggest changes to financial reporting within the European Union over the last decade has been the growth of country-by-country (CbC) reporting. European legislation has required companies in certain sectors such as banking to publish information either about their performance or their payments to governments for each country where they operate. Our research explores the relevance of disclosures that have been mandated by the Capital Requirement Directive IV for the banking industry. We construct a composite performance indicator using a Benefit-of-the-Doubt model to explore how this information can be employed by stakeholders to evaluate the operational performance of European banks. Data for 39 of the 50 largest European banks over the period 2015–2019 are included in the study, with four major findings. Firstly, the results suggest that the risk of underperformance can be sizeable; there are a large number of low performing and a small number of high performing bank establishments. Secondly, both the bank-level gap (BLG) and the jurisdiction-level gap (JLG) are important sources of low performance. Thirdly, the path for improvement varies for different banks; while some need to enhance performance within specific jurisdictions compared to the other jurisdictions of the same bank, others must improve their performance relative to other banks. Finally, there is heterogeneity in the results at a country level, and the best performing establishments are often located in countries considered as tax-havens under certain taxonomies.

On 26 April 2016, Thailand introduced new tax evasion legislation which was enacted by Parliament in April 2017. The Act amended previous anti-money laundering legislation, transferred prosecution of serious tax evasion cases from the Revenue Department to an anti-money laundering unit and permitted the seizure of an accused's assets once criminal proceedings had been initiated. Drawing on institutional theory, our study examines why this legislation was introduced. It focusses on the formal institutions and legitimacy. Specifically, it reports on 35 interviews with a range of stakeholders to ascertain their views about the reasons behind this legal change. The results suggest that external and internal legitimacy concerns acted as catalysts for the change. These results have practical implications for those investigating the issue of tax evasion and policy implications for those examining whether legislation will impact the incidence of tax evasion within a country.

This study examines the impact of the COVID 19 pandemic on the stock markets of China, India, Pakistan, the UK and the US using Generalised Autoregressive Conditional Heteroscedasticity (GARCH) and Threshold GARCH models with COVID 19 as an exogenous dummy variable in the variance equation. The sample period of 2016–2021 is divided into two sub-periods: the pre-COVID 19 period and the COVID 19 period. The results of the study indicate that there was persistent volatility in these markets and that this volatility increased as a result of the pandemic. In addition, the Threshold GARCH results indicate that the asymmetric term was significant in all markets indicating that bad news, such as the pandemic, had a stronger impact on the conditional variance of the returns as compared to good news. In addition, the results further confirm that the US market had no significant impact on the volatility of the Chinese market during the pandemic. The results have important implications for (1) international investors regarding portfolio management and investment risk minimisation in situations like the COVID 19 pandemic; and (2) policy-makers in terms of how they respond to any future pandemic.

Accounting information has traditionally played a crucial role in business valuations (Arnold and Moizer, 1984). However, the role of accounting and a company's information system in the assessments and valuations of investee firms by VC investors is poorly understood. This is especially true for VC investors in developing nations such as countries in the Middle East. The current chapter examines the importance placed on accounting data and an investee's information system by Saudi VCs who operate throughout the Middle East. The analysis is based on interviews with a group of Saudi VC investors as well as several entrepreneurs who were seeking VC funding at that time. The results suggest that, in the Saudi context, accounting information can play a crucial role in the VC decision to invest in a company, although the type of accounting information used (audited vs. internally produced) varied according to the maturity of the investee company.

Purpose This paper aims to examine how capital investment projects are appraised in Lebanon; whether the risk is incorporated into this process by Lebanese firms and the impact of political risk on the capital budgeting process. Design/methodology/approach This paper uses a questionnaire survey to investigate the capital budgeting practices of companies located in Lebanon, which is a country characterised by a high level of political risk. Findings Lebanese companies tend to use more than one method of investment appraisal and, increasingly, they are using sophisticated discounted cashflow techniques alongside the payback period. The most widely used methods to evaluate risk include scenario and sensitivity analysis. Finally, political risk plays an important role in the capital budgeting processes of Lebanese companies. Originality/value The paper reports on whether the methods of capital investment appraisal used throughout advanced Western economies are used in the context of an emerging economy. In addition, Lebanon is an ideal research site to study capital budgeting as the conflicts in the country of the past 50 years have required sizeable new expenditure on capital projects; the country is characterised by high levels of political risk which may lead corporate managers to use different approaches to investment appraisal and it provides an opportunity to study capital budgeting decisions by private, unlisted firms.

This paper investigates the relationship between changes in the newspaper-based infectious diseases tracking index (ITI) of Baker et al. (2020) and sectoral stock market returns in the US.Our results spanning the period 1985:01 to 2020:03 reveal the presence of a negative (positive) relationship between returns and ITI at lower (higher) return quantiles (representing different market conditions) in a majority of the sectors.For the health care sector, this relationship is negative at all quantiles.Interestingly, inclusion of the COVID-19 period in the sample data leads to the detection of a stronger relationship for smaller quantiles across all sectors.An asymmetric relationship between returns and the ITI is witnessed across different market conditions for the Consumer Staples, Healthcare, Industrial and Technology sectors.Results from a rolling regression uncover differences in the magnitudes of responses to various infectious diseases over time.Our results carry important implications regarding investment strategies for US sectoral returns in the presence of news relating to infectious diseases.

The current study examines the association between earnings quality (EQ) and investment efficiency (IE) using the conditional effect of legal origin. Further, we assess the influence of the institutional ownership (IOW) on the relationship between EQ and IE within different legal environments, using a sample of 22,446 firm-year observations from the US, the UK, Germany and Japan over the period of 2001–2018. In general, the results provide cross-country evidence that a higher EQ enhances IE. Further, the results indicate that higher EQ can mitigate overinvestment and underinvestment problems by ensuring that firms move toward their optimal level of investment. In addition, the findings reveal that a country’s legal environment affects IE with EQ having a stronger association with IE in common law countries as compared to code law economies. In terms of the conditional role of IOW, the findings illustrate that the effect of IOW on the relationship between EQ and IE varies within different legal origins. The results are robust to alternative measures for the main variables examined. This study provides policy implications for investors, managers, regulators, and theorists about the role of the institutional settings on the relation between certain properties of EQ and IE.

This paper documents evidence of changes in the co-movement of stock returns and risk transmission among four South Asian stock markets over periods of regional market reform and global market instability. The sample period (1993–2015) is disaggregated into three sub-periods: before and after the establishment of the South Asian Federation of Exchanges (SAFE) and after the 2008 Global Financial Crisis. The principal components investigation and cointegration analysis conclude that the co-movement among stock returns in this region altered amidst a change in the institutional context and global economic uncertainty. Using a tetra-variate GARCH-BEKK model, we find that, after the establishment of SAFE, the interactions among the markets increased through volatility spillovers, but decreased through shock spillovers. In addition, there were more shock and volatility spillovers in the last sub-period as compared to the first two sub-periods, indicating that risk transmission across countries increased during the period of uncertainty. In particular, the Indian stock market was a risk spreader in South Asia after the setup of SAFE and its influence on the regional stock markets increased even further after the 2008 Global Financial Crisis.

This case looks at the initial public offering (IPO) of 180 m shares in Uber Technologies Inc. on May 9th 2019. It considers why the company was seeking to list its shares on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) at this time and the possible issue price for these shares using valuation multiples from a competitor (Lyft Inc.) that was already listed. The difficulties associated with valuing Uber's IPO are examined by considering the legal, regulatory, staffing and other problems which affected the company at this time. This case considers whether Uber had the characteristics of an unsuccessful IPO. The main purpose of this case is to highlight how the first-day returns for the IPO performed poorly relative to findings from the literature about past IPOs. Finally, the case considers possible explanations for the poor first-day returns.

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to provide a theoretically informed analysis of a struggle for power over the regulation of corporate social responsibility (CSR) and social and environmental accounting and reporting (SEAR) within the European Union.Design/methodology/approachThe paper combines insights from institutional theory (Lawrence and Buchanan, 2017) with Vaaraet al.’s (2006) and Vaara and Tienar’s (2008) discursive strategies approach in order to interrogate the dynamics of the institutional “arena” that emerged in 2001, following the European Commission’s publication of a Green Paper (GP) on CSR policy and reporting. Drawing on multiple sources of data (including newspaper coverage, semi-structured interviews and written submissions by companies and NGOs), the authors analyse the institutional political strategies employed by companies and NGOs – two of the key stakeholder groupings who sought to influence the dynamics and outcome of the European initiative.FindingsThe results show that the 2001 GP was a “triggering event” (Hoffman, 1999) that led to the formation of the institutional arena that centred on whether CSR policy and reporting should be voluntary or mandatory. The findings highlight how two separate, but related forms of power (systemic and episodic power) were exercised much more effectively by companies compared to NGOs. The analysis of the power initiatives and discursive strategies deployed in the arena provides a theoretically informed understanding of the ways in which companies acted in concert to reach their objective of maintaining CSR and SEAR as a voluntary activity.Originality/valueThe theoretical framework outlined in the paper highlights how the analysis of CSR and SEAR regulation can be enriched by examining the deployment of episodic and systemic power by relevant actors.

This paper uses Credit Default Swap (CDS) data for Asian reference entities to examine cross-country credit risk spillover effects between sovereigns and firms. Data for three East Asian countries (China, Japan and South Korea) over the period 2009-2018 are analysed. We analyse changes in the CDS spreads of a sovereign debtor and those of a foreign firm via a bivariate GARCH-full-BEKK model; thus, spillovers in mean spread changes as well as in volatility are considered. The main findings indicate that strong credit risk interdependence exists between the East Asian countries given that credit shocks from a common creditor such as Japan appear to spill over to the other two Asian nations. Compared to their non-financial counterparts, financial institutions are more sensitive than non-financial firms to changes in the credit risk of a foreign sovereign debtor; financial institutions such as banks may hold debt of foreign sovereigns which makes their CDSs sensitive to this source of credit risk. (C) 2020 Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

PurposeThere has been an ongoing call from various groups of stakeholders for social and environmental practices to be integrated into companies’ operations. A number of companies have responded by engaging in socially and environmentally responsible activities, while others choose not to participate in these activities, which incur additional costs. The absence of consensus regarding the economic implications of social and environmental practices provides the impetus for this paper. This study aims to examine the association between corporate social and environmental practices (CSEP) and the cost of equity capital measured by four ex ante measures using a sample of UK listed companies.Design/methodology/approachFirst, we undertake a review of the extant literature on CSEP. Second, using a sample of 236 companies surveyed in “Britain’s most admired companies” in terms of “community and environmental responsibility” during the period 2010-2014, we estimate four implied a cost of equity capital proxies. The relationship between a companies’ cost of equity capital and its CSEP is then calculated.FindingsThe authors find evidence that companies with higher levels of CSEP have a lower cost of equity capital. This finding determines the significant role played by CSEP in helping users to make useful decisions. Also, it supports arguments that firms with socially responsible practices have lower risk and higher valuation.Practical implicationsThe finding encourages companies to be more socially and environmentally responsible. Furthermore, it provides up-to-date evidence of the economic consequences of CSEP. The results should, therefore, be of interest to managers, regulators and standard-setters charged with developing regulations to control CSEP, as these practices are still undertaken on a voluntary basis by companies.Originality/valueTo the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study to investigate the association between CSEP of British companies and their cost of equity capital. The study complements Ghoul et al. (2011), who examine the relationship between CSR and the cost of equity capital of the US sample. The authors extend Ghoul et al. (2011) by using a sample of the UK market after applying International Financial Reporting Standards.

Sudies have shown that religious beliefs and practice play an important role in influencing share price behaviour. Evidence of a Ramadan effect has been documented in Muslim countries suggesting an increase in mean returns as well as a reduction in volatility during the ninth month of the Islamic calendar. In addition to the Ramadan effect, studies have also documented a January effect in Muslim countries. The current study investigates what happens when the Ramadan effect and the January effect occur at the same time. Controlling for the effects of financial crises and time-varying volatility in returns, the results for individual company data from four countries with sizeable Muslim populations indicate higher returns and lower volatility when these two effects overlap, except in one, arguably more Western country, Turkey. (c) 2018 Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.