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This study examines the impact of CSR (corporate social responsibility) on stock price volatility of oil and gas firms and, then identifies the moderating role of tax avoidance.

To achieve the study's purposes, 330 observations are extracted from 30 oil and gas firms for the period between 2010 and 2020, and the estimation method of the Generalized Least Squares (GLS) is used. Actually, the CSR is proxied using the ESG (environmental, social, and governance) score, and the stock price volatility is measured by the degree of stock price variations over 12 months, according to the last 52 week's price.

The main findings indicate that CSR negatively impacts the stock price volatility. Nonetheless, this negative relationship is moderated positively by tax avoidance. This result is robust to the variation in the measure of volatility, namely the systematic risk.

This research is helpful for investors to manage their portfolio risk as this article highlights the importance of engaging in sustainable development to reduce financial risk. This study also helps regulators and policymakers, such as environmental agencies and tax authorities, to reassess their control with oil and gas firms and record them according to their CSR practices, because this article emphasizes that it is not fair to pay taxes and engage in CSR practices at the same time.

The impact of CSR on stock price volatility is widely treated for firms. Nevertheless, the mechanisms that may affect this relationship are still seldom discussed. This study attempts to examine the impact of tax avoidance on the CSR–stock price volatility relationship for the oil and gas industry.

The purpose of this study is to examine the interactive impact of tax avoidance and tax risk on the firm value.

This study covers 290 observations on non-financial corporations listed on the Tunisian Stock Exchange for the period ranging from 2008 to 2020, using the multiple linear regression technique.

The results show that tax avoidance positively affects the firm value while tax risk has a negative influence on the company value. More importantly, tax risk moderates the positive impact of tax avoidance on the firm value. Accordingly, tax avoidance must be considered in conjunction with tax risk when studying the effect on the firm value. The findings of additional analyses indicate that when tax avoidance is associated with a high level of tax risk, it negatively affects the firm value. Thus, investors negatively rate the high-risk tax avoidance.

The major limitation of this study is that it focuses only on Tunisian listed companies since their financial statements are publicly available. Although the sample is relatively small due to the problem of data availability, it is satisfactory owing to the twelve-year sampling period (from 2008 to 2020). Research implications- The results obtained are of great interest to researchers as they should be more careful in simply using effective tax rates as a measure of risky or aggressive tax avoidance.

The findings may signal the need for Tunisian firm managers to consider spillovers when adopting risky tax avoidance strategies and to implement a tax risk management policy within the firm. They are also substantial for Tunisian regulators to create requirements for reporting risky tax avoidance practices in the company annual reports to protect the investors’ rights and the society interest in general. The results are also useful for the investors who would like to make good decisions with respect to tax planning strategies. It is not enough to rely on the Effective Tax Rate (ETR) to judge whether or not tax planning is risky. Volatile ETRs, as a proxy of the tax risk, can be useful for them in decision-making.

The results also highlight that risky tax avoidance decreases the firm value, and thus confirm the negative repercussions that such behavior can have not only on the firm, but also on the society in general, as the corporate tax contributes to covering the State public expenditure. Hence, it is considered a general concern.

The present study differs from others in the existing literature. In fact, it examines the joint effect of tax avoidance and tax risk on the firm value for Tunisian listed companies which are characterized by the predominance of agency conflicts between major shareholders and minor ones. Therefore, the authors seek to investigate if small shareholders can penalize risky tax avoidance practices by decreasing the firm value.

The study aims to compare the level of accounting conservatism amongst the sample companies prior to the 2011 uprising and after that uprising. The study proceeds further to examine the association between accounting conservatism and the level of leverage and profitability of the sample companies covering the same period.

First, a review of the extant literature on accounting conservatism is undertaken. Second, the sample comprises all the non-financial companies listed on the Egyptian Exchange. Accounting conservatism is measured using the market-to-book (MTB) ratio, which is one of the most widely used proxies for determining the extent of accounting conservatism in prior literature. The two-sample t-test has been used to compare the level of accounting conservatism six years prior to the 2011 uprising and four years following that uprising. Univariate and multivariate analyses have been used to examine the association between some firm characteristics and the level of accounting conservatism amongst the sample companies at the two investigated periods.

The evidence implies that the sample companies are actually engaging in less-conservative accounting policies following the uprising. The results also reveal that data for the first period seems to have greater variations in the first period than in the second period, as can be seen from the values of the standard deviation. The multivariate analysis reported a significant positive relationship between only size and the level of accounting conservatism at both periods.

This study adds Egyptian evidence with respect to the directions of accounting conservatism throughout crisis periods, as the majority of prior studies focus on countries with developed capital markets. In addition, the absence of any specific evidence concerning the direction of accounting conservatism during crisis periods will lead to naïve investors misinterpreting earnings figures and not realising the actual value of their shares.

The results reported in this study may encourage those investors to seek out extensive, widely-sourced information regarding investee firms before deciding whether to hold or sell their holdings. Furthermore, the results presented in this paper should therefore be of interest to regulators and standard-setters charged with developing accounting standards to improve the quality of accounting information.

To the best of authors’ knowledge, this is the first and most recent study that examines the level of accounting conservatism amongst non-financial companies in a developing country like Egypt.

The purpose of the current study is to assess Omani teachers’ performance on tasks related to the stages of engineering design. To achieve this, data from an engineering design test was used, and demographic variables that are correlated with this performance were identified.

This descriptive study employed a cross-sectional design and the collection of quantitative data. A sample of preservice science teachers from Sultan Qaboos University (SQU) (n = 70) participated in this study.

Findings showed low and moderate levels of proficiency related to the stages of engineering design. Differences between males and females in terms of performance on engineering design tasks were found, with females scoring higher overall on the assessment. Biology preservice teachers scored higher than teachers from the other two majors (physics and chemistry) in two subscales. There were also differences between teachers studying in the Bachelor of Science (BSc) program and the teacher qualification diploma (TQD) program.

This study provides an overview, in an Arab setting, of preservice science teachers’ proficiency with engineering design process (EDP) tasks. It is hoped that the results may lead to improved instruction in science teacher training programs in similar contexts. Additionally, this research demonstrates how EDP competency relates to preservice teacher gender, major and preparation program. Findings from this study will contribute to the growing body of research investigating the strengths and shortcomings of teacher education programs in relation to science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) education.

The purpose of this paper is to provide an improved genetic algorithm to solve 0/1 multidimensional knapsack problem (0/1 MKP), by proposing new selection and crossover operators that cooperate to explore the search space.

The authors first present a new sexual selection strategy that significantly improves the one proposed by (Varnamkhasti and Lee, 2012), while working in phenotype space. Then they propose two variants of the two-stage recombination operator of (Aghezzaf and Naimi, 2009), while they adapt the latter in the context of 0/1 MKP. The authors evaluate the efficiency of both proposed operators on a large set of 0/1 MKP benchmark instances. The obtained results are compared against that of conventional selection and crossover operators, in terms of solution quality and computing time.

The paper shows that the proposed selection respects the two major factors of any metaheuristic: exploration and exploitation aspects. Furthermore, the first variant of the two-stage recombination operator pushes the search space towards exploitation, while the second variant increases the genetic diversity. The paper then demonstrates that the improved genetic algorithm combining the two proposed operators is a competitive method for solving the 0/1 MKP.

Although only 0/1 MKP standard instances were tested in the empirical experiments in this paper, the improved genetic algorithm can be used as a powerful tool to solve many real-world applications of 0/1 MKP, as the latter models several industrial and investment issues. Moreover, the proposed selection and crossover operators can be incorporated into other bio-inspired algorithms to improve their performance. Furthermore, the two proposed operators can be adapted to solve other binary combinatorial optimization problems.

This research study provides an effective solution for a well-known non-deterministic polynomial-time (NP)-hard combinatorial optimization problem; that is 0/1 MKP, by tackling it with an improved genetic algorithm. The proposed evolutionary mechanism is based on two new genetic operators. The first proposed operator is a new and deeply different variant of the so-called sexual selection that has been rarely addressed in the literature. The second proposed operator is an adaptation of the two-stage recombination operator in the 0/1 MKP context. This adaptation results in two variants of the two-stage recombination operator that aim to improve the quality of encountered solutions, while taking advantage of the sexual selection criteria to prevent the classical issue of genetic algorithm that is premature convergence.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the use of real earnings management by private and public firms in a unique institutional setting, which is the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries. The paper also compares the level of real earnings management between public and private firms in the GCC area.

The GCC area is a unique setting to investigate the use of real earnings management because of the low enforcement of reporting standards and supervisory rules, lack of sophisticated financial analysis, specialized media tools and high concentration of capital ownership. The authors use different models of real earnings management proposed by Roychowdhury, 2006, cash flow management, productions cost management and discretionary expenses management to examine the use of real earnings management.

The paper documents evidence consistent with private and public firms using real earnings management to influence their earnings figures. The paper also shows that the level of real earnings management is higher for private firms compared to public firms when cash flow management and discretionary expenses management models are used. The production cost model results show evidence consistent with public firms only engaging in real earnings management through production cost reduction.

The results of this study might not be applicable to other emerging markets.

The findings of this study should promote a general understanding of firms’ behavior in unique environment such as GCC countries. Regulators in the GCC region should be aware that real earnings management techniques have been used by firms and that extra caution is required when auditing or analyzing the financial information of private and public firms in the GCC market.

This paper contributes to the literature in many aspects. First, it provides additional evidence on the use of earnings management in unique market contexts outside the USA and Europe. The GCC markets share many common characteristics that make them interesting settings to be investigated. Second, this paper adds more evidence on the use of earnings management between public and private firms. In this regard, the paper adds additional evidence in the discussions proposed by Ball and Shivakumar (2005) and Givoly et al. (2010) who use two competing perspectives to investigate earnings quality in public and private firms: the demand hypothesis and the opportunistic behavior hypothesis.

The purpose of this study is to examine the impact of internal and external corporate governance mechanisms on the probability of engaging in tax aggressiveness.

This study uses a sample of 52 firms listed on the Tunis stock exchange observed over the 2003–2016 period (The authors had to stop sampling in 2016 because the measurement of tax aggressiveness requires 4 years after the year of study. Therefore, the data on the measurement of tax aggressiveness were collected until 2020). This paper uses the logistic regression technique.

The results of the first logistic regression show that ownership structure and the supervision role of the tax authorities are determining factors that explain tax aggressiveness; while, the attributes of the board of directors does not seem to explain the probability of engaging in aggressive tax strategies. To further probe this question, the authors carried out additional analyses that examine the moderating effect of controlling shareholders on the relationship between the attributes of the board and tax aggressiveness. The results of our additional regressions indicate that the effect of these attributes improves in cases of non-presence of a controlling shareholder. This implies that the role that the board of directors can play in controlling management is possibly conditioned by the presence or no of control block holders.

The major limitation of this study is that it concentrates only on Tunisian listed companies because they are the only companies the financial statements of which are publicly available in Tunisia. Although the sample is relatively small due to the problem of data availability, it appears to be satisfactory given the 15-year sampling period (i.e. from 2003 to 2016).

The results of the study may help Tunisian regulators create requirements for corporate governance (such as the size of the board of directors and audit committee or the concentration of ownership). Moreover, this study not only focuses on the effect of corporate governance mechanisms on tax aggressiveness but also provides shareholders with information on the governance mechanisms to which they should pay more attention in their desire to obtain more efficient tax results.

The findings are also useful for tax policymakers seeking to identify the circumstances that give rise to an increased risk of tax aggressiveness, as tax aggressive behavior and the resulting non-payment of taxes also have societal implications. In fact, taxes also play an important role in financing the provision of public goods, making corporation tax a matter of public concern.

The present study differs from others in the existing literature by designing a more precise measure of tax aggressiveness and examining the interaction between two internal governance mechanisms; the presence of a controlling shareholder and the attributes of the board of directors. This study also examines the impact of the control exercised by the tax authorities on the behavior of firms in terms of tax aggressiveness.

Mixed products, while presenting new business opportunities, raise considerable concerns among managers and researchers. However, whether mixed products (functionally vs culturally) trigger positive or negative consumer reactions is controversial. Hereby, the present research seeks to resolve the conflicting effects by examining the moderating role of service provider type (humanoid service robot vs human employee) in the impact of mixed products on consumer reactions.

Two studies were conducted to explore the effect of mixed products on consumer reactions. Specifically, study 1 was developed to examine the interplay of mixed products and service provider type in shaping consumers' product attitudes and purchase intentions under an offline shopping scenario; study 2 further provided evidence for the mediating roles of perceived usefulness and perceived enjoyment in the above processes under an online-shopping context.

The convergent findings of two studies conclude that, when served by a humanoid service robot (vs human employee), consumers exhibit more positive attitudes and higher purchase intentions toward functionally (vs culturally) mixed products. Furthermore, such effect is driven by the perceived usefulness (vs perceived enjoyment) when served by humanoid robot (vs human employee).

First, this is one of the first studies to conceptualize mixed products as the two-dimensional construct (i.e. functionally mixed and culturally mixed), and the findings sheds light on the mixed products literature. Second, this paper introduces service provider type as the boundary condition for the impact of mixed products on consumers' product attitudes and purchase intentions, which expands the match-up hypothesis and schema theory in service marketing. Third, the current research explores the mediating roles of perceived usefulness and perceived enjoyment in the above effects, which could make significant contribution to the motivation theory.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the effects of consumer ethnocentrism and consumer animosity at the ethnic level. This study examines both effects on an ethnic majority’s consumption of an ethnic minority’s products and services, focusing on the relationship between two ethnic groups in Malaysia.

The relationship between the constructs were analyzed using the co-variance-based structural equation modeling techniques with analysis of a moment structures version 21. Self-administered questionnaires were obtained from 325 Malay respondents in 2 Malaysian cities.

The results suggest that ethnic-based consumer ethnocentrism can negatively affect product judgment and product judgment can affect consumers’ willingness to buy. Two significant findings were rejected as the directions of the results were not as hypothesized.

Future research could study other ethnic groups of different countries using specific ethnic related products and/or brands.

This research suggests that ethnic-based ethnocentrism and ethnic-based animosity are important factors for businesses to consider as both can affect ethnic consumers’ purchasing behavior. Depending on ethnic consumers’ perception toward a brand, a manager may face either an opportunity or a challenge.