Conference Agenda

Environmental innovation is needed to mitigate the detrimental impact of environmental degradation. Recent advances in the disclosure of environmental innovation data motivate us to study whether a company's environmental innovation can impact its market valuation in an international context. We study whether and how investors value a firm's environmental innovation. Using an international dataset, we find that environmental innovation takes time, and a positive long-term change in a company's environmental innovation can enhance its market valuation. This result suggests that a firm's positive sustained change in environmental innovation is a material factor in investors' allocation decisions. We show that investors' response to a positive long-term change in a firm's environmental innovation is facilitated through the risk mitigation mechanism. Our findings have implications for designing a specific innovation-motivating managerial incentive scheme, which links managerial behaviour with a firm's valuation. The use of stock options with long vesting periods could motivate managers to pursue environmental innovation despite the risk of early-stage failures and the long time for markets to recognise the value of environmental innovation as an intangible asset.

This study explores the importance of a rule-based governance paradigm on agency cost, risks and inclusion of global insurance companies. We use a sample of 351 insurance companies across 5 regions. Firm-level data were collected from the LSEG database, and we use World Bank database to collect country-level data. Our pooled OLS results confirm that insurance companies suffer greater agency costs, take lower risks and offer higher returns under a rule-based governance system. These results remain consistent with robust proxies and after endogeneity corrections using IV-2SLS and GMM regression. We also find that insurance companies with a rule-based governance, operating in a country with a rule-based system are higher performers when measured using return on asset and stock return. Our findings are in line with the prudent man hypothesis and offer policy implications for regulators and insurance industry practitioners.

This study examines the concept of blockchain constitutionalism, a novel framework for understanding how blockchain governance adapts to political and regulatory pressures. While blockchain networks are celebrated for their decentralization and transparency, external interventions, such as compliance mandates and political events, pose significant challenges to these ideals. Using a multi-method approach combining event study analysis and panel regression, this research evaluates the immediate and structural impacts of such interventions on governance metrics, including validator concentration and token distribution. The findings reveal that regulatory and political forces consistently erode decentralization, compelling blockchain networks to adopt centralized mechanisms to align with external mandates. By situating blockchain governance within broader discussions of institutional theory and socio-political dynamics, this paper contributes to the evolving discourse on the resilience of decentralized systems in politically sensitive environments. This research bridges governance, institutional theory, and behavioral finance, contributing to interdisciplinary dialogues within high-impact academic forums. These insights provide valuable theoretical and practical implications for academics, policymakers, and blockchain stakeholders.

This paper examines the impact of CEO overconfidence on bank payout policies, exploring dividend and stock repurchase behaviours in U.S. commercial banks from 2000 to 2021. We find that overconfident CEOs significantly reduce payouts, cutting dividends by approximately 24.58% and repurchasing 9% fewer shares to build loss-absorbing capital, enabling the pursuit of risky strategies whose successes they can attribute to their leadership. The effect intensifies in opaque banks but is mitigated by institutional ownership oversight. Furthermore, crises shape these dynamics: payout declines during banking crises like the GFC but increases during non-banking crises such as COVID-19. We also uncover evidence of the disposition effect, where investors respond quickly to dividend increases but delay reacting to decreases. Finally, we observe muted market reactions to dividend increases under overconfident leadership, advancing understanding of CEO behaviour, market psychology, and regulatory interactions.