Search

The outbreak of COVID‐19 has brought the world to a standstill, with severe consequences on economic and health systems, requiring the identification and implementation of innovative solutions. This study's aims are threefold: first, to examine the impact of balanced and combined dimensions of ambidexterity on for‐profit organizations' innovation performance related to pandemics; second, to uncover whether and to what extent such innovation performance contributes to tackling global health grand challenges (i.e., mortality rate, risk of infection, and life expectancy) associated with pandemics; and, third, to investigate the moderating role of social equalities in health in the relationships between innovation performance and health‐related outcomes associated with pandemics. To uncover how for‐profit firms tackle the health‐related consequences of pandemics, we examine whether they have introduced product innovations to the health sector, defined as the market introduction of a new or significantly improved good, that have helped address the health challenges associated with the COVID‐19 pandemic. Using a panel dataset (1974–2020) with 15,062 firm‐year observations from the United States, we show that both the separate and the synchronous implementation of the balanced and combined dimensions of ambidexterity have a strong positive effect on firms' innovation performance and, particularly, innovation initiatives related to the pandemic. The results also reveal that innovation activities (i.e., granted patents and citations focused on COVID‐19) negatively affect mortality rate and risk of infection, as well as the positive impact of innovation on increasing life expectancy, with social equalities in health moderating this relationship. Taken together, we make novel contributions to the literature on how to tackle the health‐related consequences of pandemics through innovation and provide actionable managerial guidance on how firms can enhance innovation performance.

The outbreak of COVID-19 has brought the world to a standstill, with severe consequences on economic and health systems, requiring the identification and implementation of innovative solutions. This study's aims are threefold: first, to examine the impact of balanced and combined dimensions of ambidexterity on for-profit organizations’ innovation performance related to pandemics; second, to uncover whether and to what extent such innovation performance contributes to tackling global health grand challenges (i.e., mortality rate, risk of infection, and life expectancy) associated with pandemics; and, third, to investigate the moderating role of social equalities in health in the relationships between innovation performance and health-related outcomes associated with pandemics. To uncover how for-profit firms tackle the health-related consequences of pandemics, we examine whether they have introduced product innovations to the health sector, defined as the market introduction of a new or significantly improved good, that have helped address the health challenges associated with the COVID-19 pandemic. Using a panel dataset (1974–2020) with 15,062 firm–year observations from the US, we show that both the separate and the synchronous implementation of the balanced and combined dimensions of ambidexterity have a strong positive effect on firms’ innovation performance and, particularly, innovation initiatives related to the pandemic. The results also reveal that innovation activities (i.e., granted patents and citations focused on COVID-19) negatively affect mortality rate and risk of infection, as well as the positive impact of innovation on increasing life expectancy, with social equalities in health moderating this relationship. Taken together, we make novel contributions to the literature on how to tackle the health-related consequences of pandemics through innovation and provide actionable managerial guidance on how firms can enhance innovation performance.

The main aim of this paper is to firstly investigate if all components of ESG are equally reported by companies and secondly to identify the impact political and economic institutions and macroeconomic variables have on the composite ESG index. Utilizing data for environment, social and governance from Refinitiv and constructing composite indices based on the Principal Component Analysis, the authors investigate the effect of socio-economic factors on ESG over the period 1984-2020 for 139 countries using a Panel Fixed Effects model with structural breaks. The results reveal that there is an increasing trend for the Social, Governance and aggregate ESG indices, but not for the Environment index where the trend is decreasing. Moreover, considering the role of economic and political institutions and macroeconomic variables, higher levels of corruption, civil disorder, civil war, economic and financial risk, ethnic and religious tensions, foreign pressures, risk in law and order, military in politics and inflation, have a negative effect on ESG performance. In contrast, income per capita and trade openness have a positive impact on ESG performance with heterogeneous results before and after 2010. The findings have significant policy, practical and social implications emphasizing the importance for ESG reporting to be uniformly implemented with globally accepted standards.

The outbreak of COVID-19 has brought the world to a standstill, with severe consequences on economic and health systems, requiring the identification and implementation of innovative solutions. This study's aims are threefold: first, to examine the impact of balanced and combined dimensions of ambidexterity on for-profit organizations' innovation performance related to pandemics; second, to uncover whether and to what extent such innovation performance contributes to tackling global health grand challenges (i.e., mortality rate, risk of infection, and life expectancy) associated with pandemics; and, third, to investigate the moderating role of social equalities in health in the relationships between innovation performance and health-related outcomes associated with pandemics. To uncover how for-profit firms tackle the health-related consequences of pandemics, we examine whether they have introduced product innovations to the health sector, defined as the market introduction of a new or significantly improved good, that have helped address the health challenges associated with the COVID-19 pandemic. Using a panel dataset (1974–2020) with 15,062 firm-year observations from the United States, we show that both the separate and the synchronous implementation of the balanced and combined dimensions of ambidexterity have a strong positive effect on firms' innovation performance and, particularly, innovation initiatives related to the pandemic. The results also reveal that innovation activities (i.e., granted patents and citations focused on COVID-19) negatively affect mortality rate and risk of infection, as well as the positive impact of innovation on increasing life expectancy, with social equalities in health moderating this relationship. Taken together, we make novel contributions to the literature on how to tackle the health-related consequences of pandemics through innovation and provide actionable managerial guidance on how firms can enhance innovation performance.

The first part of the chapter will contextualize sustainable development and disentangle it from environmental, social, and governance (ESG). The second part will locate the leadership qualities needed which synthesizes sustainable development and ESG reporting, while the third part will put it in context of sustainable finance. As advocated by BlackRock (Sustainability goes mainstream. 2020 Global Sustainable Investing Survey. https://www.blackrock.com/corporate/literature/publication/blackrock-sustainability-survey.pdf, 2020), sustainability is here to stay, and over time investors have demonstrated their interest in addressing ESG considerations. ESG includes human rights; environmental pollution; healthcare; social problems; elimination of poverty; equal rights in the workplace; stronger compliance with local, state, federal, and international laws; diversity; etc. The European Commission (sustainable finance and EU taxonomy: commission takes further steps to channel money towards sustainable activities https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_21_1804, 2021a; What is sustainable finance. A new sustainable finance strategy and implementation of the action plan on financing sustainable growth. https://ec.europa.eu/info/business-economy-euro/banking-and-finance/sustainable-finance/overview-sustainable-finance_en, 2021b) added transparency to ESG, especially in cases of risks regarding the financial and worldwide economy. Is it possible to have a sustainable business and sustainable finance without ethical leadership? In support of Sharma et al. (Leadersh Org Dev J 40(6):712–734, 2019), many leaders today consider ethics important. It is considered that the leaders ought to look out for the people, fairness, sustainability, and integrity. Leaders need to be open to allocating power, giving clear ethical directions at their workplace, building respect, honesty, sincerity, equality, and transparency. It has also been argued that leaders need to foster

The relationship between corruption and tourism has been sporadically examined over the years. According to the existing theory, there is an inverted U relationship which implies that tourism demand initially increases as corruption increases (greasing the wheels) and after a certain threshold level of corruption, tourism demand decreases (sanding the wheels). Empirical studies so far concentrated on capturing the nonlinear relationship, by applying a simple linear model and by including corruption as a quadratic term. In the current paper, the authors revisit the “greasing and sanding the wheels” hypothesis by applying an advanced econometric technique, the threshold regression model, which deals with a key element of model uncertainty, namely, parameter heterogeneity. In particular, using a sample of 83 countries from 2001-2018 the authors firstly examine if there is a nonlinear relationship between corruption and tourism and then, they estimate the threshold value of corruption. According to the results the null hypothesis of a linear model against the alternative of a threshold model with two regimes is strongly rejected. Furthermore, whilst the effect of corruption on tourism is positive in the low corruption regime and negative in the high corruption regime, a heterogeneous relationship is also found between other politicosocio-economic variables and tourism demand in the low and high corruption regimes.

The relationship between corruption and tourism has been sporadically examined over the years. According to the existing theory, there is an inverted U relationship which implies that tourism demand initially increases as corruption increases (greasing the wheels) and after a certain threshold level of corruption, tourism demand decreases (sanding the wheels). Empirical studies so far concentrated on capturing the nonlinear relationship, by applying a simple linear model and by including corruption as a quadratic term. In the current paper, the authors revisit the “greasing and sanding the wheels” hypothesis by applying an advanced econometric technique, the threshold regression model, which deals with a key element of model uncertainty, namely parameter heterogeneity. In particular, using a sample of 83 countries from 2001 to 2018, the authors firstly examine if there is a nonlinear relationship between corruption and tourism, and then, they estimate the threshold value of corruption. According to the results, the null hypothesis of a linear model against the alternative of a threshold model with two regimes is strongly rejected. Furthermore, while the effect of corruption on tourism is positive in the low corruption regime and negative in the high corruption regime, a heterogeneous relationship is also found between other politico-socio-economic variables and tourism demand in the low and high corruption regimes.