Access to clean cooking energy remains a significant challenge globally, particularly in regions such as Sub-Saharan Africa, the Pacific Islands, and South Asia, where urban and rural disparities are most pronounced. In the Pacific Islands, rural areas continue to rely heavily on traditional biomass, exacerbating health and environmental issues. This study reviews trends in clean cooking energy access in the Pacific, emphasizing the stark differences between urban and rural regions. Through a comprehensive analysis of regional data, policy frameworks, and case studies, we identify barriers including limited infrastructure, high costs, and lack of awareness, which hinder the adoption of clean cooking technologies. To address these challenges, we examine the potential of biogas digesters as a renewable and sustainable solution. Biogas digesters not only provide clean energy but also offer significant benefits for public health, environmental conservation, and economic development. However, their successful deployment requires comprehensive policy interventions. This study proposes actionable recommendations: introducing targeted subsidies for rural households to reduce the high upfront costs of biogas systems, leveraging public-private partnerships to develop local supply chains, integrating clean cooking technologies into national energy strategies, and using community-based education programs to raise awareness about the health and economic benefits of clean energy. Furthermore, examples of successful policy frameworks, such as Fiji’s National Energy Policy 2023 and Tuvalu’s biogas pilot projects, illustrate the importance of aligning national plans with regional clean energy goals. By aligning with Sustainable Development Goal 7 (SDG 7), which advocates for universal access to affordable and clean energy, this study underscores the broader impact of clean cooking energy solutions on agriculture, business, education, healthcare, and transportation. Bridging the clean cooking energy gap is critical for advancing public health, fostering inclusive economic growth, and achieving sustainable development in the Pacific Islands.

This paper develops an empirical model to explore how EPU impacts inventory levels in U.S. firms and the effect on firm value under high EPU. This is the first paper to investigate the impact of macroeconomic risk measured by the EPU on inventory and firm value. We apply panel data regression methodology to financial data from a COMPUSTAT sample of 330,905 quarterly observations between 2002 and 2023 for U.S.-based firms. We measure firm value using the market-to-book ratio of assets, which enables us to link inventory policy to market valuation directly. We find that with increased EPU, the total inventory levels, raw material, and finished goods inventory increase, while work-in-process (WIP) inventory level decreases. This indicates that during high EPU, firms increase raw material and finished goods inventory to hedge against supply and demand shortages, while streamlining their internal production processes and workflow, which lowers the WIP inventory, achieving higher inventory leanness. Our findings also indicate that inventory levels and firm value follow an inverted U-shaped relationship. A higher inventory level due to EPU is value-enhancing until it reaches a threshold point, beyond which a firm's value decreases.

Small Island Developing States (SIDS) frequently rely on firewood for cooking, resulting in adverse environmental, health, economic, and educational impacts. Addressing clean cooking energy needs is thus a priority for SIDS to meet Sustainable Development Goal 7 (SDG7). This study explores policy implications for clean energy access through a case study on Kavewa Island, Fiji, where biogas digesters and stoves were introduced across 22 households. A pre- and post-implementation analysis reveals significant benefits, including reduced firewood collection time, fertilizer production, and monthly savings for some households. Despite these gains, half of the households continue to use firewood daily, often due to family size or low income. Additionally, many respondents expressed concern over the vulnerability of biogas systems to adverse weather, highlighting the need for further resilience measures. Policy recommendations include prioritizing clean cooking initiatives in remote islands, funding for ongoing research and project evaluation, and capacity building to promote sustainable cooking practices. This case study suggests that biogas systems can contribute to the energy, social, and economic needs of remote communities, and that targeted policy support could facilitate a wider transition to clean cooking energy in Fiji, the Pacific, and other similar regions.

This paper traces the reaction of US banks to ROE underperformance on liquidity creation, equity capital, and loan loss provisions. We find that banks change their structures in the subsequent quarter after underperformance by increasing their on-balance and off-balance sheet liquidity creation to increase profitability. Banks tend to increase their equity capital and improve their loan quality by lowering non-discretionary loan loss provisions to become safer. Banks signal their ability to overcome underperformance by increasing their discretionary loan loss provisions. Our results reveal that large banks rely mainly on off-balance sheet liquidity creation as their primary tool to recover from underperformance while medium-size and small banks adjust their equity capital to increase their safety.

Currently, over 1.5 billion people, especially in the Global South, live without access to modern energy for household uses, especially for cooking. Therefore, this study examines the cooking space of the Global South with a specific focus on the rural communities to map alternative energy sources, technologies and supporting policies to drive clean cooking services for improved socioeconomic development. It begins with a literature review on clean cooking technologies and clean energy access for the Global South, which leads to the suggestion of clean cooking policies by mapping technology, affordability, accessibility, climate action, business model and local capacity. In order to ensure that the validation is appropriate, three online questionnaires were designed to capture three categories of key stakeholders with distinctive and complementary interests in clean energy access for cooking: (i) End-users, (ii) Energy Suppliers and (iii) Interest Groups in rural communities in Fiji, Ghana and Nigeria. The responses are analysed to conduct a comparative study across the three countries examined. Based on the above, an attempt is made to present broad base policy pathways for adopting clean cooking services in the rural community for sustainable development. The policy pathways harmonize the major stakeholders in the cooking space: Governments, Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs), clean energy developers, business services and the end-users. In addition, a business model in the context of a rural community cooking space is proposed, stating that the initial life of the clean cooking business should be government-driven and, thereafter, followed by incentive-driven at the mid-life of the business (say, 25% technology penetration) and private-sector-driven at the late-life (say, 45% technology penetration). It is expected that the effort made in this work could be advanced by investigating the detailed techno-economic parameters of clean cooking technologies that could be influenced by the policy pathways established in connection with the sociocultural factors associated with energy services.

This paper investigates whether the takeover market has been affected by heightened macroeconomic uncertainty, following President Trump's Election, both in the US and globally. We have based our analysis on a four-year period around the 2016 US elections, and as such we have observed an increase in M&A deals and associated valuations, after the election; this was especially true for cross-border deals acquiring U.S. targets, consistent with a tariff-jumping hypothesis. The high target valuations are also the product of the implementation of a lower corporate tax rate, which reveals positive externalities for U.S. targets, stemming from the protectionist and lower corporate tax initiatives of the regime.

The Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs recently ran a consultation inviting expert input to determine how United Kingdom (UK) policymakers would be guided by five internationally recognised environmental principles when making policy affecting the environment. The principles are listed in a draft of the Policy Statement on Environmental Principles, a ground-breaking novelty of the Environment Bill – which recently passed through the UK Parliament. This article comments on this promising development with a focus on its implications for the development and implementation of policies for the protection of the marine environment. It advances that, while there is a lot of promise in the Bill creating a legally binding duty on Ministers across Whitehall to have due regard to the Statement while developing high-level strategic policies around marine environmental protection, it seems to exclude local authorities who are in charge of developing Marine Plans within the existing UK marine planning framework. This omission is problematic as it fails to recognise the crucial role which these authorities play in the actual delivery of nationally-developed high-level marine environmental protection policies and consequently weakens Her Majesty’s Government’s status as a global leader in this space.

In this paper, we examine the impact of female Chief Technology Officers (CTOs) on corporate innovation. We find that firms with female CTOs are more innovative (as captured by both patent counts and patent citations) than firms with male CTOs. This effect is more pronounced for firms with a stronger innovation-supportive culture, firms with female CEOs, and when female CTOs are more powerful. Using mediation analyses, we further validate that female CTOs' transformational leadership style is a plausible mechanism through which they affect innovation positively.

The drastic banking reform within Central and Eastern Europe following the collapse of the Soviet Union provides an ideal quasi-experimental design to examine the causal effects of institutional development on accounting quality (AQ). We find that banking reform spurs significant improvement in predictive power of earnings and reductions in earnings smoothing, earnings-inflating discretionary provisions, and avoidance of reporting losses. These effects hold under alternative model specifications and after considering concurrent institutional developments. In contrast, corporate reform shows no such effects, refuting the alternative explanation that unobserved factors affect both reform speed in general and the quality of financial reporting. We further identify four specific reformative actions that are integral to the drastic banking reform process where prudential regulation contributes the most to the observed AQ improvement. It supports the conjecture that banking reform improves AQ by reducing banks' risk-taking behaviors and, as a result, their motive behind accounting manipulation.

In this paper, we aim to test whether and how corporate social responsibility (CSR) is valued in merger and acquisition (M&A) transactions. Employing multiple regression and logistic regression methods to examine the CSR in China’s domestic M&A market from 2007 to 2018, we reveal the following: (i) acquisition targets with higher social performance can attain higher acquisition valuation, especially when the acquirers are also socially responsible; (ii) high-CSR acquirers are inclined to choose equity payments, while high-CSR acquisition targets prefer to be paid in cash; (iii) high CSR performance boosts M&A success rate. The findings are robust, due to adopting two-stage least squares method to tackle endogeneity, substituting variable measures and data sources, and winsorizing variables at high levels to eliminate outliers. The value of CSR in M&As possibly results from the role of CSR in reducing information frictions, agency concerns, and corporate risks and is primarily associated with activities which are friendly to suppliers, customers, shareholders, public welfare, and natural environment, as well as being higher in developed regions and irrelevant to corporate ownership and nature. The study is of vital significance to the valuation and decision making in M&A deals.

This paper investigates the effects of CEO’s social network on bank risk-taking. We document a positive relation between bank CEO’s social connections and bank risks. To address the endogeneity concerns, we use deaths and retirements within networks to perform a difference-in-difference analysis, and find robust results. We also report that well-connected bank CEOs take more risk when more of their social ties are linked to informationally opaque firms and when the labor market offers fewer employment options. In addition, diversity of social ties (professional and educational) helps to mitigate the impact on risk. Finally, this study reveals an inefficient trade-off between bank risk and return, suggesting that executive social networks lead to excessive bank risk.

This paper develops an empirical model to investigate the impact of macro-economic risk on working capital and the various types of inventory. Our analysis helps manufacturing firms anticipate the implications of high macro-economic risk, measured through the economic policy uncertainty (EPU) index, on their operations. Using a sample of 6503 US manufacturing firms during the period 1990–2018, we show that EPU drives high levels of inventory, thus corroborating existing theories about random disruptions raising safety-stock levels. We also show that increased economic uncertainty yields higher trade credits, payables, and working capital, thus requiring firms to tie more capital to their operations. Our results are statistically significant, yet these effects are small at the firm level. The results are robust when applying the monetary policy uncertainty (MPU) index to the subsample of the data from 1990 to 2007, instead of the EPU index to the same data set.

Rule 144A allows a firm to issue securities without a public registration statement with the Securities and Exchange Commission, and only qualified institutional investors can purchase such securities. In this study, focusing on corporate bonds issued under Rule 144A, we empirically investigate the relationship between the corporate social responsibility (CSR) of issuing firms and the bond yield spread at issuance. We document a significant and positive relation between CSR concerns, whereas CSR strengths seem to play an insignificant role in determining bond yield spread. Our main findings are robust to the instrumental variable approach and simultaneous equation estimation to address the potential endogeneity issues. We further explore the time-series changes in issuing firms’ CSR profiles, and report that institutional investors demand a higher bond yield spread when issuing firms’ exposure to higher social, environmental, and stakeholder concerns. Our analyses reveal that the main sources of such risk exposure are stakeholder conflict and concerns from primary stakeholder groups.

Journal of Futures MarketsVolume 36, Issue 4 p. 315-315 Issue Information - TOCFree Access Journal of Futures Markets: Volume 36, Number 4, April 2016 First published: 07 March 2016 https://doi.org/10.1002/fut.21744AboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat No abstract is available for this article. Volume36, Issue4April 2016Pages 315-315 RelatedInformation

In this paper, we examine the point and density forecast accuracy of econometric models, surveys and futures rates in predicting the LIBOR‐Federal Funds Rate (LIBOR‐FF) spread during and after the financial crisis. We provide evidence that the futures market forecast outperforms all competing forecasts during and after the financial crisis and that its predictive density is well calibrated. Our results also suggest that the predictive accuracy of the econometric models improves in the post‐crisis period. We argue that the post‐2009 improvement in the econometric models' forecasts is attributable to the absence of LIBOR manipulation. The economic significance of the uncovered predictability is assessed using a trading strategy. Our results suggest that trading based on the futures market and econometric forecasts generates positive risk‐adjusted returns. © 2015 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Jrl Fut Mark 36:345–374, 2016

This paper is the first to investigate the effect of firm governance characteristics on takeover premiums and returns using an industry-adjusted corporate governance measure. We demonstrate that the worse the governance characteristics of the target firm are, relative to the industry average, the more its efficiency is improved by the acquisition, and the greater the synergistic gains and target’s return are at the announcement of an acquisition. The study also finds a positive relation between the acquirer’s governance characteristics and the combined returns, supporting the management entrenchment hypothesis. Unlike prior research that does not control for industry average governance index, we do not find a relation between acquirer returns and the industry-adjusted governance characteristics of the acquirer or the target. Our results advocate the notion that firm-specific governance partially explains the returns of a merger as industry-specific characteristics play a major role in the determination of corporate governance quality

In this paper, we examine the profitability of technical analysis for a cross section of individual Arab stocks. Our analysis, undertaken from the perspective of an Islamic investor, reveals that technical trading rules do not yield economically or statistically significant returns. While our results uncover some scant statistical evidence of technical trading rule profitability, risk adjusting the returns weakens the evidence in favor of predictability. Furthermore, break-even transaction costs do not exceed estimated transaction costs or bid-ask spreads in the markets examined.

We examine the presence, magnitude and determinants of a January effect for individual corporate bonds. Our results provide empirical evidence of positive and statistically (but not economically) significant abnormal returns in January across different event windows and models. Our results suggest that, in the addition to the term and default factors, the excess stock returns, size and book-to-market factors are priced for individual bond returns. We investigate a number of determinants of the January abnormal returns for individual bonds. Our findings suggest that the reversal and tax-loss selling effects are important determinants of the abnormal returns on individual bonds.

Both researchers and practitioners recognize the importance of the interactions between financial and inventory decisions in the development of cost effective supply chains. Moreover, achieving effective coordination among the supply chain players has become a pertinent research issue. This paper considers a three-level supply chain, consisting of a capital-constrained supplier, a retailer, and a financial intermediary (bank), coordinating their decisions to minimize the total supply chain costs. Specifically, we consider a retailer managing its cash through the supplier’s bank, in return for permissible delay in payments from the supplier. The bank, benefiting from increasing its cash holdings with the retailer’s cash deposits, offers the supplier a discount on its borrowing rate. We show that the proposed coordination mechanism achieves significant cost reduction, by up to 26.2%, when compared to the non-coordinated model. We also find that, with coordination, the retailer orders in larger quantities than its economic order quantity, and that a higher return on cash for the retailer leads to a higher order quantity. Furthermore, we empirically validate our proposed coordination mechanism, by showing that banks, retailers, and suppliers have much to gain through collaboration. Thus, using COMPUSTAT datasets for the years 1950 through 2012, we determine the most important factors that affect the behavior of the retailers and suppliers in granting and receiving trade credit. Our results indicate that engaging into such a coordination mechanism is a win–win situation to all parties involved.