Information capacity investment and financial stability under delegated asset management

Emerging Risks and Financial Stability in the Egyptian Banking Sector: Evidence from Z-Score and Non-Performing Loan Models (2016–2023)

This paper presents the first empirical evidence linking tobacco tax policies to unintended social consequences in the form of increased energy poverty. We focus on Australia, where smokers face some of the world's highest cigarette prices. We analyse an unanticipated aggressive tax regime implemented in 2010 using a difference-in-differences approach with a nationally representative panel dataset covering 14 years. Our findings indicate significant increases in the incidence of energy poverty among smoking households. Relative to the smoking cohort's pre-policy mean, subjective reports of heating difficulties rose by 24%, while objective measures increased by 38% (10% energy-burden threshold), 15% (twice-median burden), and 26% under the Low-Income High Costs (LIHC) measure. Mechanism analyses indicate that reduced energy expenditures and compromised financial stability exacerbate the observed energy poverty. The impacts were particularly pronounced among lower-income families, heavy smokers, and individuals who find quitting hard. This research highlights the complex trade-offs involved in aggressive tobacco taxation and emphasises the need for targeted measures to mitigate the negative consequences on the energy well-being of vulnerable smokers and their families.

This study examines the relationship between non-interest income and bank earnings stability in emerging market banking systems, using panel evidence from 26 commercial banks over a six-year period. As financial sectors in developing economies increasingly diversify revenue sources beyond traditional intermediation, the stability implications of such diversification remain empirically contested. Guided by Modern Portfolio Theory, this study evaluates the effect of disaggregated components of non-interest income fees and commissions income, foreign exchange trading income, dividend income, and other operating income on bank insolvency risk measured by the Z-score. Quantitative research design was employed using balanced panel data, and both pooled Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) and fixed effects regression models were estimated to account for time and bank-specific heterogeneity. The findings indicate that fees and commissions income and other operating income are positively associated with financial stability, suggesting that certain forms of revenue diversification enhance earnings resilience. In contrast, foreign exchange trading income and dividend income exhibit statistically insignificant effects on insolvency risk. The results demonstrate that the composition of non-interest income, rather than diversification per se, determines stability outcomes in emerging markets. These findings provide important implications for bank management and regulatory policy, highlighting the need for targeted diversification strategies that strengthen, rather than undermine, financial stability.

This study examined the impact of Supply Chain Risk Management (SCRM) practices on supply chain resilience. It was guided by three key questions: (1) What timely risk identification practices enhance resilience? (2) What monitoring practices strengthen resilience? and (3) What risk treatment strategies support resilient outcomes? A descriptive research design with a quantitative approach was adopted. The study targeted heads of departments, procurement and stores managers, administrative officers, production managers, project managers, and finance officers. Using purposive sampling, 40 respondents were selected from a population of 60, with 39 valid responses collected through self-administered questionnaires. The data were coded and analyzed using SPSS. Findings revealed that effective supply chain risk management is crucial to an organization's survival and resilience. Firms that identify risks early are better positioned to maintain control, allocate resources efficiently, enhance agility, and implement timely mitigation strategies. Continuous risk monitoring was found to improve flexibility, visibility, collaboration, and overall responsiveness. Similarly, structured risk treatment practices strengthened recovery capacity, resistance, redundancy, trust, financial stability, and competitive advantage. The study concludes that the timely and systematic implementation of risk identification, monitoring, and treatment practices significantly enhances supply chain resilience and organizational performance. It recommends that organizations adopt cost-effective, process-driven risk management systems, promote timely information sharing among stakeholders, decentralize risk-related decision-making, and foster a strong risk management culture. Further research with larger samples is encouraged to deepen the understanding of emerging dimensions of supply chain resilience.

The rapidly growing healthcare landscape necessitates effective leadership and management. The healthcare sector is constantly evolving due to shifts in science, technology, politics, and economics. Therefore, strong leadership is crucial to adapt to these changes. This paper aims to provide a literature review on the influence of leadership on the performance of healthcare organizations. The findings of this review reveal that healthcare leaders influence organizational performance through their ability to foster a positive culture, enhance the quality of care, and maximize financial stability. The key skills that define strong leadership include strategic thinking, communication, problem-solving, and emotional intelligence. On the other hand, ineffective leadership practices are a threat to the organization’s success and effectiveness. Poor leadership adversely impacts healthcare organizations through reduced productivity, increased financial costs, and damaged reputation. The major toxic leadership behaviors include poor communication, a lack of accountability, a lack of empathy, and micromanagement. The review concludes that strong leadership is essential for improving the performance of healthcare systems.

University of Oxford currently operates within a “pincer movement” defined by a systemic funding crisis in UK higher education and a global transparency revolution regarding admissions equity. This paper evaluates the economic trade-offs for Oxford of lowering admissions standards for “development cases”—the children of wealthy benefactors—to secure financial stability. Utilizing frameworks like the principal-agent problem, game theory, and price discrimination, the analysis explores whether the short-term financial benefits of increased philanthropy can justify the long-term risks to Oxford’s reputational capital. While a cross-subsidization model could theoretically utilize donor funds to expand access for underprivileged students, the paper argues that this creates a moral hazard and a “pay-to-play” dynamic that undermines the university’s meritocratic mission. By examining comparative global models from Scandinavia and Singapore, as well as recent legal precedents in the United States, the study demonstrates that institutional prestige and research impact are inextricably linked to the integrity of the admissions process. Ultimately, the paper concludes that the long-term costs—including brand dilution, diminished social mobility, and weakened network effects—far outweigh the immediate capital gains, suggesting that Oxford must protect its status as a meritocratic engine of human capital to remain competitive in a globalized economy.

This study examines how carbon transition risk affects corporate financial stability in Indonesia, using a multi-theoretical lens grounded in Stakeholder, Agency, and Legitimacy theories. Indonesia provides a distinctive setting where many corporate strategies lag behind emerging national policies, yet firms face increasingly stringent expectations from global markets. Using 932 firm-year observations from non-financial listed companies (2021–2024), the study applies panel data regression to test the link between carbon exposure and financial stability. The results show a significant negative relationship: high-emitting firms experience a “legitimacy gap” and are penalized by financial stakeholders. Consistent with transition risk mechanisms, investors and lenders appear to treat emissions as a proxy for future liabilities, effectively importing global carbon-pricing pressure before domestic regulations are fully enforced. From an Agency Theory perspective, this indicates a governance failure—management’s inability to align short-term operations with long-term decarbonization—creating strategic vulnerabilities that weaken solvency. The study contributes by confirming that carbon exposure is a material financial risk in an emerging economy, driven by the mismatch between corporate readiness and global transition demands. It also frames decarbonization as a board-level priority to preserve capital access and supports mandatory climate disclosures to standardize risk assessment.

This study investigates the relationship between press freedom and bank default risk across countries, with particular attention to the role of institutional quality, financial development, and information transmission mechanisms. Using an unbalanced panel of 128 countries over the period 2000–2022, the paper applies dynamic panel data techniques to examine how press freedom affects banking stability, measured by the banking Z-score. To account for cross-country heterogeneity, countries are grouped by income level, geographic region, and resource dependence. In addition, a panel Blinder–Oaxaca decomposition is employed to identify the factors driving differences in average bank default risk across country groups, while a Threshold ARCH (TARCH) model is used to assess asymmetric responses of bank risk to positive and negative news. The results show that press freedom alone is not a consistent predictor of bank default risk across countries. Instead, its impact depends on the broader informational and institutional environment. In countries with higher education levels and greater internet penetration, increased press freedom is associated with higher bank default risk, indicating that more informed and digitally connected populations may react more strongly to financial news, amplifying herding behavior and bank fragility. Evidence from the TARCH model further suggests that bank default risk responds asymmetrically to news shocks, with negative news exerting a stronger effect than positive news. Overall, the findings underscore the importance of institutional context when evaluating the role of press freedom in financial stability.

As a key indicator of macroeconomic performance, inflation trends significantly influence monetary policy, macroeconomic regulation, and financial market stability. However, macroeconomic time series often contain both linear trends and complex nonlinear fluctuations, which limit the accuracy and stability of traditional statistical models. To address this, the paper proposes an improved ARIMA-LSTM hybrid forecasting model for inflation rate prediction. The ARIMA component extracts the linear structure of the series, while the residual sequence captures unexplained nonlinear information. A multi-scale LSTM network then learns deep features from the residuals, and a dynamic weight fusion mechanism adaptively combines linear and nonlinear predictions. Experiments using CPI data from IMF, World Bank, and FRED databases show that the proposed model achieves an RMSE of 0.564 on the test set—12.1% lower than the traditional ARIMA-LSTM and 17.1% lower than ARIMA alone. It also outperforms models such as SVR, random forest, LSTM, and GRU in MAE and MAPE. In multi-step forecasting, error growth remains around 12% over six steps, notably lower than comparison models. Ablation studies and Diebold–Mariano tests confirm the effectiveness of the multi-scale module and dynamic fusion mechanism. Overall, the improved ARIMA-LSTM model enhances inflation prediction accuracy and stability, offering practical value for macroeconomic forecasting and policy analysis.

Indonesia’s financial system is bank-centric, with banks managing approximately 78% of the nation’s financial assets; therefore, the effectiveness of monetary policy transmission depends on banks’ responsiveness to the central bank’s interest rate policy (the BI Rate). However, a policy-relevant anomaly persists: deposit rate pricing is more strongly anchored to the Deposit Insurance benchmark (IDIC Rate) than to the BI Rate. This study argues that this research is significant because it identifies a “Dual Benchmark System” that traditional single-anchor models fail to address, representing a critical friction in emerging market transmission. This study examines this dual-benchmark paradigm and the associated asymmetric risks using a panel VAR with a Generalized Impulse Response Function (GIRF) on quarterly data for 63 commercial banks from 2010 to 2024. The results indicate that IDIC Rate shocks have a larger and more persistent effect on deposit rates than BI Rate shocks, generating asymmetric transmission risks. This dominance creates a structural “price ceiling” that keeps funding costs high, ultimately raising lending rates for borrowers and distorting deposit growth rates. Furthermore, this analysis reveals that external policy signals are far more influential than internal financial performance. This suggests that under the Basel III framework and prevailing financial regulations, banks prioritize liquidity compliance and safety net protection over internal operational efficiency. Macroeconomic shocks remain weaker than policy shocks and dissipate more quickly. This finding reveals a potential systemic coordination risk, implying an urgent need for tighter policy coordination between the Central Bank and the IDIC to reduce structural frictions, maintain transmission effectiveness, and protect long-term financial stability.

Malaria remains a significant public health challenge in Nigeria, accounting for substantial morbidity, mortality, and economic loss. Successive administrations have implemented various anti-malarial drug policies aimed at curbing this endemic disease. This study applies a formal economic evaluation framework-integrating both cost-effectiveness analysis (CEA) and cost-benefit analysis (CBA)-to assess and compare anti-malarial drug policies across different presidential regimes. A comparative economic evaluation was conducted using incremental cost-effectiveness ratios (ICERs) and benefit-cost ratios (BCRs) derived from regime-specific expenditure and health outcome data. The study reviewed policy documents, drug procurement records, and health outcome data spanning multiple administrations from 1999 to the present. Costs were calculated based on drug procurement expenses, implementation costs, and healthcare savings from reduced malaria incidence. Effectiveness was measured by reductions in malaria morbidity and mortality, along with improvements in health-adjusted life years (HALYs). Analyses were conducted from both the healthcare system and societal perspectives, with all financial figures adjusted for inflation and purchasing power parity (PPP) to 2024 Naira equivalents. The study found varying effectiveness and cost-efficiency across different administrations. During the 1999-2007 administration, the National Malaria Control Program (NMCP) had an implementation cost of ₦120 billion, leading to a 35% reduction in malaria prevalence and an ICER of ₦150,000 per HALY gained. The 2007-2010 administration saw a decrease in malaria control investment to ₦75 billion, resulting in only a 15% reduction in cases and a less favorable ICER of ₦220,000 per HALY. In 2010-2015, funding increased to ₦140 billion, achieving a 40% reduction in malaria cases and improving cost-effectiveness to ₦130,000 per HALY, corresponding to a BCR of 1.25. From 2015 to 2023, despite economic challenges, ₦200 billion was invested in expanding access to Artemisinin-based Combination Therapy (ACT), reducing malaria mortality by 20% and yielding a moderate ICER of ₦170,000 per HALY and a BCR of 1.10. Preliminary data from the 2023-present administration indicate an allocation of ₦220 billion, focusing on innovative financing models and domestic production of ACTs, with early results suggesting potential cost reductions to ₦160,000 per HALY and an estimated BCR of 1.30. The scientific evaluation demonstrates that while all regimes contributed to progress in malaria control, the degree of cost-effectiveness varied significantly based on policy focus, funding efficiency, and governance structure. Regimes that prioritized evidence-based drug policy and stable financing achieved superior health gains per Naira spent. This underscores the importance of data-driven, economically sustainable policy design to sustain malaria control achievements and improve population health outcomes in Nigeria.

Parish budget programming faces structural weaknesses derived from inconsistencies between the regulatory framework, planning instruments, and operational practices, generating misalignments between institutional goals, financial allocations, and actual expenditure execution. The objective of this study was to analyze the effect of normative coherence on the quality of parish budget programming, considering inter-instrument consistency, procedural formalization, and regulatory compliance as explanatory factors. A quantitative explanatory approach with a non-experimental design was adopted, using official administrative records and applying Pearson correlation, analysis of variance (ANOVA), and structural equation modeling estimated through maximum likelihood. The results revealed a positive and statistically significant relationship between normative coherence and programmatic quality, substantial differences in quality levels according to coherence degree, and a considerable direct structural effect. It is determined that normative coherence strengthens goal–allocation alignment, reduces deviations between programmed and executed budgets, and enhances territorial financial stability, positioning itself as a key technical component in optimizing the parish budget cycle.

This project examines the tax compliance and auditing practices followed by an organization, with reference to Consortax Consulting Private Limited, Hyderabad. The study focuses on income tax calculation, tax auditing procedures, and overall compliance systems to ensure adherence to statutory requirements. The study first analyses Income Tax procedures, including computation of taxable income, application of deductions, calculation of tax liability, advance tax payments, TDS provisions, and filing of Income Tax Returns (ITR). Proper maintenance of financial records and reconciliation of tax data are also examined to ensure accuracy and transparency. Secondly, the project evaluates Tax Auditing practices. Tax auditing involves systematic verification of financial statements, books of accounts, and tax returns to confirm compliance with the Income Tax Act and other regulations. Audit checks help identify errors, reduce risks, and prevent non-compliance. Finally, the study reviews Tax Compliance mechanisms such as timely filing of returns, payment of taxes, GST compliance, and response to statutory notices. It identifies possible compliance gaps and suggests measures like improved documentation, internal controls, and periodic review systems for effective tax management. The study concludes that strong tax compliance and auditing practices are essential for avoiding penalties, ensuring legal conformity, and maintaining financial stability within the organization.

This paper concentrates on the ratio analysis of ‘Muthoot Fincorp’ to evaluate the overall financial performance of the company. The main aim of this research is to analyze the liquidity position, profitability efficiency, solvency position, operational efficiency, and overall financial stability of the company through various key financial ratios calculated from the published financial statements of the company. The research is conducted using the secondary data obtained from the annual reports and other publicly available financial statements of the company for a number of years. Various ratios, including liquidity ratios, profitability ratios, solvency ratios, and activity ratios, have been calculated and analyzed to understand the trends and performances of the company. The comparative and trend analysis techniques have been applied to determine the strengths and weaknesses of the company and areas that require improvement. The results of this research help to understand the company’s ability to pay off its shortterm financial obligations, earn profits, manage assets effectively, and develop in the long term. The analysis also explains the linkage between financial management and overall corporate performance. This research concludes by providing recommendations to improve financial efficiency and ensure sustainable development. This study makes a contribution to a better understanding of financial performance evaluation through ratio analysis and can be used as a reference by academicians, investors, and financial analysts.

The aim of this study was to analyze the financial perfor-mance and stability of company A and company B during the period from 2020 to 2024. Using the EMS model and BEX index, key indicators of profitability, liquidity, leverage, and asset turnover were assessed. Results show that company B achieved higher ROA (3.96-6.95%) and ROE (8.09-12.26%), with stable liquidity and reduced leverage, whereas company A recorded lower results and greater reliance on external financing. The analysis also indicates strong long-term sustainability for company B and moderate financial risk for company A. The study highlights the need for cost optimization, strengthening the capital structure, and continued monitoring of liquidity and profitability in the logistics sector. These findings provide practical guidance for strategic management and future growth planning in logistics companies.

The COVID-19 pandemic placed exceptional strain on essential services, raising urgent concerns about the mental well-being of workers in critical sectors. This study examines the short- and medium-term effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on the mental health of health and social care (HSC) workers in the UK relative to other occupational groups. Using data from the UK Household Longitudinal Study and measuring mental health via the General Health Questionnaire (GHQ), we apply a difference-in-differences strategy, where both groups could be treated only in the second period (a pre-post design), to investigate whether HSC workers experienced distinct mental health trajectories compared to other key workers (KWs) and workers in non-essential sectors (non-KWs). The results for the immediate post-pandemic period (April-November 2020) show no significant differences in mental health for HSC workers compared with either comparator worker groups. Medium-term outcomes remained statistically insignificant across occupational comparisons. Additional analyses of individual GHQ items and potential mechanisms (financial stability and social isolation) suggest limited heterogeneous effects for each worker group using yearly data. While all studied groups exhibited some deterioration in mental health after 2020, HSC workers' trajectories largely mirrored those of other KWs and non-KWs, suggesting that factors such as stable employment and financial security may have cushioned the psychological impact for this sector.

Abstract The banking sector is one of the most important pillars of economic development and financial stability. The performance and efficiency of employees play a major role in determining the success of banking institutions. In recent years, increasing attention has been given to the role of workplace conditions in influencing employee productivity. A healthy workplace environment refers to a setting where employees feel physically comfortable, mentally secure, and socially supported while performing their duties. This study focuses on understanding how different aspects of the workplace environment influence the productivity of bank employees. Information for the research was gathered through questionnaires and informal discussions with employees working in various bank branches

This paper examines the role of entrepreneurial managementin the intergenerational transition of family businesses, analyzedthrough a qualitative research approach encompassing economic,social, and emotional dimensions. Findings reveal that a well-structured,multi-phase succession process—featuring early successorinvolvement and clearly defined criteria—enhances the likelihood ofsuccessful authority transfer while maintaining financial stability andpreserving core family values. The transition typically entails a shiftfrom autocratic to democratic leadership, reflecting a growing perceptionof employees as vital organizational assets. Successors demonstrateprofessionalism and innovation by adopting new sales strategies,advancing technological modernization, and utilizing externalfunding sources such as EU programs, thereby improving market competitiveness.Ultimately, successful intergenerational transition relieson clear governance structures, transparent decision-making, and abalance between socio-emotional and economic goals to ensure thelong-term sustainable growth of the family enterprise.

This study empirically investigates hierarchical endogeneity and shock transmission among three major international stock markets the S&P 500, FTSE 100, and Nikkei 225 from 2010 to 2023. Utilizing a Vector Autoregression framework and Granger causality test, the research examines the direction and strength of cross-market dependencies. The findings reveal a clear, asymmetric structure where the US market acts as the primary exogenous driver, with unidirectional causality flowing from the S&P 500 to both the FTSE 100 and Nikkei 225. A secondary channel of influence from the UK to Japan was also identified. Forecast error variance decomposition confirms the US market's dominance, explaining over 25% of the movements in the UK's financial market and 18.7% of Japan's forecast error variance, while remaining largely insulated from feedback. The findings of this study suggest that international markets are characterized by hierarchical endogeneity, challenging notions of symmetric interdependence and highlighting significant implications for financial stability frameworks making a noteworthy contribution.