Thi Le

Purpose
This study investigates the impact of Environmental, Social, Governance (ESG) overall score and its pillars on firm risk and the mediating role of earnings management.

Design/methodology/approach
The research applies Generalised Method of Moments (GMM) regression to address endogeneity in a panel of Australian-listed firms from 2014 to 2023.

Findings
The findings reveal that higher ESG scores are associated with lower firm risk, with governance and social pillars exerting the most substantial immediate effects. In contrast, the environmental pillar demonstrates a delayed risk-reducing impact, reflecting long-term benefits rather than short-term volatility reduction. Moreover, the study identifies earnings management as a significant mediator that partially offsets ESG's stabilising effects, highlighting that firms with strong ESG practices are less likely to engage in accrual-based earnings management, thus reducing risk.

Practical implications
These findings have critical implications for investors, regulators, and policymakers. They underscore the importance of pillar-level ESG evaluation, long-term orientation in environmental assessments, and integrating financial transparency into ESG frameworks.

Originality/value
This study contributes to the extant knowledge of ESG overall and the individual pillar effect on firm risk in Australian companies, highlighting the mediating role of earnings management (EM). By identifying earnings management as a partial mediating mechanism, the study extends agency and stakeholder theories beyond direct ESG–firm risk association through the lens of financial reporting behaviour. This integrated framework bridges sustainability and earnings management literatures, offering a more comprehensive theoretical understanding of how ESG performance is related to firm risk.

This study undertakes a systematic literature review combined with bibliometric analysis to examine how abnormal returns are studied in relation to environmental, social, and governance (ESG) factors, investor sentiment, and dividend policy. Using RStudio version 2025.09.0+387 and VOSviewer version 1.6.20, we conduct a bibliometric study that integrates performance analysis, science mapping, and network analysis. The dataset consists of 532 publications published between 2000 and 2025 and indexed in the Web of Science and Scopus databases. Our results show that scholarly work on abnormal returns is organised around three main thematic areas. First, investor sentiment is closely linked with event study applications, behavioural finance explanations, and sentiment analysis, which underscores the importance of psychological influences in understanding market anomalies. Second, prior studies on dividend policy continue to rely heavily on event study designs to evaluate how markets react to dividend announcements. Third, investor sentiment and dividend policy are connected through their common focus on abnormal returns, which operate as a central conceptual link between these strands of literature. Although interest in behavioural and policy-related determinants of abnormal returns has grown over time, work that explicitly incorporates ESG considerations remains relatively marginal. This peripheral position points to an important gap, suggesting that the dynamic relationships among ESG performance, investor sentiment, dividend decisions, and abnormal returns are still not fully explored. The contribution of this study lies in bringing these elements together by mapping research on event studies while treating ESG performance as a potential market signal that may shape both investor sentiment and corporate financial policy.

This study examines the impact of overall Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) performance and its pillars on the default probability of Australian-listed firms. Using a panel dataset spanning 2014 to 2022 and applying the Generalized Method of Moments (GMM) regression, we find that firms with higher ESG scores exhibit a significantly lower likelihood of default. Disaggregating the ESG components reveals that the Environmental and Social pillars have a negative association with default risk, suggesting a risk-mitigating effect. In contrast, the Governance pillar demonstrates a positive relationship with default probability, which may reflect potential greenwashing behavior or an excessive focus on formal governance mechanisms at the expense of operational and financial performance. Furthermore, the analysis identifies trade credit financing (TCF) as a partial mediator in the ESG–default risk nexus, indicating that firms with stronger ESG profiles rely less on external short-term financing, thereby reducing their default risk. These findings provide valuable insights for corporate management, investors, regulators, and policymakers seeking to enhance financial resilience through sustainable practices.

This research investigates the dynamic spillover effects among green bond markets and the impact of investor sentiment on these spillovers. We employ different research methods, including a time-varying parameter vector autoregression, an exponential general autoregressive conditional heteroscedasticity, and a generalized autoregressive conditional heteroskedasticity-mixed data sampling model. Our sample is for twelve international green bond markets from 3 January 2022 to 31 December 2024. Our results evidence the strong correlation between twelve green bond markets, with the United States and China being the net risk receivers and Sweden being the largest net shock transmitter. We also find the varied impact of direct and indirect investor sentiment on the net total directional spillovers. Our research offers fresh contributions to the existing literature in different ways. On the one hand, it adds to the green finance literature by clarifying the dynamic spillovers among leading international green bond markets. On the other hand, it extends behavioral finance research by including direct and indirect investor sentiment in the spillovers of domestic and foreign green bond markets. Our study is also significant to related stakeholders, including investors in their portfolio rebalancing and policymakers in stabilizing green bond markets.

The impact of intellectual capital on green innovation has been extensively studied at the firm level. However, the influence of moderating factors on this dynamic at the national level remains underexplored in previous studies. This study examines the role of institutional quality in moderating the relationship between national intellectual capital and green innovation across seventeen Asia–Pacific economies over the last twenty years, starting from 2000. Various techniques are employed to account for cross-sectional dependence and slope homogeneity in panel data analysis, enabling the examination of this relationship over the long and short term. The study also considers the marginal effects of national intellectual capital on green innovation at different degrees of institutional quality. Overall findings indicate that increasing national intellectual capital and institutional quality increases green innovation. Interestingly, the effects of national intellectual capital on green innovation intensify with a greater degree of institutional quality. We also find that enhancing economic growth and the efficient exploitation of natural resources appear to stimulate green innovation in Asia–Pacific economies. Findings imply that policies to improve green innovation should align with traditional economic growth strategies and effectively leverage intangible resources, particularly national intellectual capital. This unique empirical study examines the moderating role of institutional quality in the national intellectual capital–green innovation nexus in Asia–Pacific economies.

The research collects data from 214 non financial enterprises listed on the Vietnamese stock market over the period from 2012 to 2023. The study measures the extent of overinvestment by listed companies on the Vietnamese stock market and assess its impact on firm performance. The findings indicate that 37.43% of enterprises in Vietnam are overinvesting. Utilizing the static panel data regression method, the results demonstrated consistency with agency theory and prior empirical studies by confirming that overinvestment has a negative impact on firm performance. These findings provide valuable insights for enterprise managers and investors in the market.

Challenging the perceived immunity of Islamic stocks to the global financial crisis, this research investigates whether there was any coherence and long-run cointegration between Islamic stocks of BRIC countries and S&P 500 options implied volatility smirk (IVS) in BRIC countries during the global financial crisis (GFC). Employing Engle–Granger and Johansen’s cointegration tests along with wavelet coherence analysis, this study reveals significant long-run cointegration and both short-term and long-term wavelet coherence between IVS and Islamic stock returns (ISRs). Since the S&P 500 options IVS is a reliable indicator of GFC in the context of the conventional stock market, the cointegration and coherence between ISRs and IVS indicate the susceptibility of ISRs to market contagion during the GFC. These findings challenge the notion of Islamic stocks as a safe haven during financial crises, showing their susceptibility to market downturns similar to conventional stocks.

This study examines whether digital transformation reduces banks' risk-taking in the Vietnamese commercial banking sector. Our research sheds light on how banks' digital transformation affects their risks, specifically regarding credit, insolvency, and liquidity. The study utilizes the readiness index for the Vietnamese commercial banks' Information and Communication Technology (ICT) Index, which the Vietnamese government has officially constructed. The OLS, PCSE, and FGLS models are employed to analyze how digital transformation reduces banks' risk-taking based on the longitudinal data from 26 commercial banks in Vietnam from 2013 to 2022. The results indicate that digital transformation significantly reduces credit risk by improving risk management capacity and reducing asymmetric information. It also helps mitigate insolvency risk by lowering costs and increasing profitability. However, digitalization does not significantly impact liquidity risk as digital channels leverage banks' lending and deposit activities. This research provides empirical evidence on the role of bank digitalization in risk-taking and concludes with recommendations for developing bank digital transformation in Vietnam and other developing countries, including suggestions for further research in this area.

This study delves into the influence of banks’ governance and ownership structures on green lending. To examine this, we utilized the two-step system GMM and PCSE methods on the panel data of Vietnamese commercial banks spanning from 2010 to 2023. The findings suggest that board characteristics, precisely board size, board independence, and gender diversity, play a significant role in encouraging banks to provide green credit. The study highlights the importance of ownership structure in green lending. Banks with a high percentage of government ownership tend to fund more green projects, while foreign counterparts are reluctant to fund green finance. A mechanism test is also conducted to point out that banks’ disclosure of their green loan commitments is an influential channel whereby corporate governance and ownership structure impact green loans. Additionally, this research finds that the issuance of the Green Loan Principles in 2018 can facilitate banks’ governance of sustainable lending.

This study aims to measure Shanghai 50 Exchange-Traded Fund (SSE 50 ETF) index options efficiency for trading in different periods of a trading day. We use an econometric model of put-call-parity to test the market efficiency for three moneyness situations: call at-the-money and put at-the-money, call in-the-money and put out-of-the-money, call out-of-the-money, and put in-the-money. The SSE 50 ETF index options market is efficient when both call and put options are at-the-money, leading to accurately-priced call and put options. The SSE 50 ETF index options market is inefficient if the call is in-the-money (out-of-the-money) and the put is out-of-the-money (in-the-money). Furthermore, call and put options are over-priced (under-priced) and underpriced (over-priced), respectively, when the SSE 50 ETF index options market is inefficient. Traders can take a long or short position based on call-put option pricing to reduce hedging costs and increase speculative premiums.
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