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Prior research shows that religiosity affects the degree of managers' risk aversion. As a result, religious firms are less likely to invest in R&D activities. Moreover, US GAAP treats these investments as expenses. For this reason, religious firms have fewer expenses in their earnings and are less likely to be in financial distress.

Data are collected from Worldscope and the Churches and Church Membership files of the American Religion Data Archive website from 1985 to 2018. With 18,199 observations in US context, the authors used the marginal effect to test the mediating effect of R&D accounting treatment.

The authors find that the marginal effect of religiosity on financial distress with US GAAP is higher than the marginal effect of religiosity on financial distress with capitalization of R&D costs, which means that accounting treatment can explain the relation between religiosity and financial distress in the US context.

The authors used linear interpolation and linear extrapolation data to be able to conduct this research over a period of 1985–2018. For future researches, the authors propose to test other factors which can explain the relationship between religiosity and financial distress based on the ethics element.

These results should be of interest to regulators because treating R&D activities as expenses can destroy the accounting performance of firms that prefer investing in risky projects. This favoritism prevents the comparison between two firms in the same industry with different risk-taking behaviors. This problem is more prevalent if the authors have two firms with different ratios of religiosity. This paper suffers from a major limitation related to data availability.

This may be the first study that investigates why religious firms are less likely to be in financial distress. This paper notes that religious firms are less likely to be in financial distress because their conservative behavior towards R&D activities coincides with the conservative R&D accounting treatment. In fact, the mismatch between expenses and revenues from R&D activities can cause financial distress.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the impact of the relationship between shareholder activism and earnings management on the market performance of French companies.

This study used 385 firm-year observations drawn from a sample of French companies belonging to the SBF 120 index from 2008 to 2012. Data was collected from annual reports of sample companies. To measure earnings management, this study used the model of Raman and Shahrur (2008). The relationship between shareholder activism, earnings management and market performance using the panel data regression model was empirically examined.

The results prove that shareholder activism, as indicated by shareholder proposals, has no impact on market performance. However, the existence of shareholder activism affects the market performance positively. In fact, a minimum of proposals proves that shareholder activism plays an appropriate and effective role in creating value. Thus, several activists would resort to “a private activism” which could be the best and the least expensive form. This form of activism is called “behind the scenes.” Findings also show that earnings management has a negative impact on market performance. As a matter of fact, these findings allow to conclude that the firm performance decreases whenever managers undertake to earnings management. Also, earnings management behavior is mainly opportunistic. Finally, the relationship between shareholder activism and earnings management has no impact on market performance. This result reveals that shareholder activism proves to be an ineffective mechanism that does not alter the accounting choices, particularly in relation to earnings management. This result shows the inability of active shareholders to define and implement strategies across their proposals, namely, “the lack of monitoring competence.”

It is important in future research to evaluate the impact of behind the scenes interventions on corporate governance. Also, this paper gives a larger dimension to the effect of shareholder activism on the market performance in the specific context of earnings management, thus justifying the need to expand this study using other methodologies to deepen and better understand this relationship in this context.

The paper's evidence contributes to an understanding of corporate governance. The finding of this study will help in monitoring and controlling fraudulent earnings management practices that effect on market performance. Further, this study is important to investors, academics and policymakers, as it demonstrates that governance reforms that encourage firms to adopt better governance practices that reduce the likelihood of earnings management.

To the best of the author’s knowledge, this paper pioneers in focusing on the impact of the shareholder activism and earnings management on the market performance because previous studies put more emphasis on pair-wise relations (Shareholder activism-earnings management, earnings management-market performance and shareholder activism-market performance). This study provides empirical evidence on the effectiveness of the relationship between shareholder activism and earnings management on market performance.

This study investigated how corporate social responsibility (CSR) impacts financial performance (FP) and examined the moderated role of corporate governance (CG). In particular, this paper aims to empirically examine the impact of CG on the relationship between CSR and FP.

This study was based on a sample of 200 firms over 2010/2021. The direct and moderating effects were tested by using multiple regression techniques.

The empirical findings indicated that companies with higher levels of CSR reporting invested more effectively than companies with lower CSR reporting levels. The empirical analysis suggested two main findings: CSR has a significant effect on FP, and this relationship depends on CG practices. This research presents new evidence that improves the discussion around CSR involvement and FP in French firms. Then, this research shows that CG positively moderates the impact of CSR on corporate FP.

These findings may be of interest to academic researchers, practitioners and regulators interested in discovering dividend policies, FP and CSR. The findings may interest different stakeholders, policymakers and regulatory bodies interested in enhancing CG initiatives to strengthen CSR because it suggests implementing a broadly accepted framework of good CG practices to meet the demand for greater transparency and accountability.

The purpose of this paper is to characterize the senior entrepreneurship context, as a solution for an unemployed qualified segment between 45 and 60 years of age, in the Northern region of Portugal, from a national and European perspective, associated to the growth trend of qualified senior unemployment in the region, based on a statistical angle and from the point of view of the motivations to become self-employed with a business creation project.

This empirical study is a cross-sectional study of mixed nature, that reconciles qualitative and quantitative analysis. A questionnaire was made and applied to a sample of 1,000 individuals and seven semi-structured interviews which four focus groups were carried out.

Findings allow us to conclude that the studied segment, skilled unemployed individuals between the ages of 45 and 60, is a growing segment that tends to evolve into long-term unemployment and underlines a potential reluctant entrepreneurship by necessity, i.e. a reduced motivational content of these unemployed people for the creation of their own job. The authors can conclude, in the Portuguese case, that government policies relating to taxes and bureaucracy are considered as unfavorable conditions or potentially inhibitors of senior entrepreneurship. Lastly, the authors underline the clear absence of specific support programs and measures for the promotion of entrepreneurship among the qualified senior unemployed and the authors propose an ecosystem creation regarding the specifics of the target group of the study.

The study identifies a set of actions and/or orientations that could be relevant and taken into account by the decision makers.

The main contribution of this paper is the better knowledge of the context and motivations for qualified senior entrepreneurship, as well as the associated personal, economic and social barriers; and the specific suggestions provided to policy makers in order to improve the context of the senior entrepreneurship.