Mental health status of informal waste workers during the COVID-19 pandemic in Bangladesh

The deadliest coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is taking thousands of lives worldwide and presents an extraordinary challenge to mental resilience. This study assesses mental health status during the COVID-19 pandemic and its associated factors among informal waste workers in Bangladesh. A cross-sectional survey was conducted in June 2020 among 176 informal waste workers selected from nine municipalities and one city corporation in Bangladesh. General Health Questionnaire (GHQ-12) was used to assess respondents’ mental health. The study found that 80.6% of the individuals were suffering from psychological distress; 67.6% reported anxiety and depression, 92.6% reported social dysfunction, and 19.9% reported loss of confidence. The likelihood of psychological distress (Risk ratio [RR]: 1.23, 95% confidence interval [CI]: 1.02–1.48) was significantly higher for female than male. Multiple COVID-19 symptoms of the family members (RR: 1.20, 95% CI: 1.03–1.41), unawareness about COVID-19 infected neighbor (RR: 1.21, 95% CI: 1.04–1.41), income reduction (RR: 1.60, 95% CI: 1.06–2.41) and daily household meal reduction (RR: 1.34; 95% CI: 1.03–1.73) were also found to be associated with psychological distress. These identified factors should be considered in policy-making and support programs for the informal waste workers to manage the pandemic situation as well as combating COVID-19 related psychological challenges.

THE IMPACT OF DIVIDEND POLICY, FINANCIAL DISTRESS RISK AND CORPORATE GOVERNANCE TOWARD STOCK PRICE

Stock investment is emerging in this era. The market on stock investment will be predicted to grow every year. Stock price is defined by offer and bid price. With this term use in Indonesia Stock Exchange, it makes people hard to guess on what will be the opening price tomorrow as asking price and bidding price need to reach an agreement. This research will investigate the impact of Dividend Policy, Financial Distress Risk, and Corporate Governance as the independent variables toward Stock Price. This research is conducted by using quantitative research method using secondary data that were taken from the LQ45 companies which are listed in Indonesian Stock Exchange with the population of 61 companies. The samples are obtained using purposive sampling method. The total sample is 42 companies from the year 2017-2019. The data analysis is using multiple linear regression analysis. Based on the results of research and analysis by using SPSS 25 indicate that: Dividend per share (dividend policy) and corporate governance have significant impact toward stock price while dividend payout ratio (dividend policy) and distress risk does not have significant impact toward stock price. It is concluded that the impact of dividend policy, financial distress risk and corporate governance is only 29.2% as the rest is impacted by other variables.

Performance, Risk, and Cost of Capital: Trends and Opportunities for Future CSR Research

The information within this study reviews the financial management literature focusing on proponents and opponents of corporate social responsibility (CSR). We review how CSR affects different areas of corporate finance. This study’s core objective is to explore the last 20 years (2000–2019) of CSR top-tier literature to develop and theoretically support CSR and environmental management. Twenty years of publications provide a considerable amount of evidence on CSR’s impacts on firm financial characteristics and some paradoxical findings. The majority of our insights support the argument that doing good is good for business. This study also highlights existing gaps in the literature. Based on our findings, we highlight three areas to further explore in the context of CSR and corporate finance: (1) Does CSR improve specific information contents in stock prices? (2) Does CSR mitigate financial distress risk? and (3) Is CSR good for firm trade credit?

The financial leverage–financial performance relationship in the emerging market of Turkey: the role of financial distress risk and currency crisis

PurposeThe purpose of this article is to examine how financial distress risk and currency crisis affect the relationship between financial leverage and financial performance.Design/methodology/approachThis study uses data of 200 firms listed on Istanbul Stock Exchange during the period from 2009 to 2019, resulting in 1950 firm-year observations. Pooled ordinary least squares, random effects, firm fixed effects and two-step system GMM models are used to investigate the hypotheses of this study.FindingsThe results reveal that financial leverage has negative and significant effect on financial performance, and that this effect is stronger for firms with higher financial distress risk. Furthermore, the findings provide moderate evidence that currency crisis exacerbates the negative association between leverage and performance.Practical implicationsThe results of this study have important implications for firms in emerging markets. Managers can enhance firm performance by reducing the level of financial leverage, especially in firms with higher financial distress risk. These firms incur higher debt costs, and then they can benefit more from the decreases in debt ratio in their capital structure. Moreover, the decreases in debt level have more importance in currency crisis times, when the access to external finance becomes more expensive and more difficult.Originality/valueTo the author's knowledge, this research is the first to examine the effect of currency crisis on the financial leverage–financial performance relationship and is one of few that investigate the role of financial distress risk in determining the linkage between leverage and firm performance.

Association between Having Cancer and Psychological Distress among Family Caregivers Using Three Years of a Nationwide Survey Data in Japan

We aimed to describe the characteristics of caregivers with cancer compared to those without and analyze the association between having cancer and caregivers’ psychological distress in Japan. We used data from the Japanese Comprehensive Survey of Living Conditions in 2010, 2013, and 2016. The participants were 5258 family caregivers aged ≥40 years, caring for only one family member whose information in the dataset was available for all the covariates included in the model. The family caregivers’ psychological distress was defined by the Kessler Psychological Distress Scale (K6) score (K6 ≥ 5). We conducted a Poisson regression analysis to examine the association between having cancer and family caregivers’ distress. The sample of family caregivers consisted of mostly females (69.3%) and people within the 40–64 years age group (51.8%). As a result, family caregivers with cancer increased across the survey periods; a higher number of participants were unemployed. When adjusted for covariates, including the presence of other diseases, having cancer was significantly associated with distress (risk ratio 1.33, 95% confidence interval 1.05–1.69) among family caregivers. Family caregivers with cancer are expected to increase in the future; it is important to provide them with more support in managing both their treatment and caregiving to cope with their distress.

Exchange Rates and Sovereign Risk

An increase in a country’s sovereign risk, as measured by credit default swap spreads, is accompanied by a contemporaneous depreciation of its currency and an increase of its volatility. The relation between currency excess returns and sovereign risk is mainly driven by default expectations (rather than distress risk premia) and exposure to global sovereign risk shocks and also emerges in a predictive setting for currency risk premia. We show that a sovereign risk factor is priced in the cross-section of currency returns and that it is not subsumed by the carry factor. This paper was accepted by David Simchi-Levi, finance.

Governance failure and its impact on financial distress

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to examine the effects of corporate governance failure, excess remuneration and entrenchment of managers, company variables and corporate governance variables on the company’s financial distress risk (DETR) in the French context. Design/methodology/approach Using the regression analysis, this paper is based on 201 observations about 67 companies of SBF 120 from 2015 to 2017. Data are collected on the Thomson Reuters database and in the referenced documents, which are published on the internet. Findings The research findings reveal that firm’s DETR is influenced negatively by excess remuneration and entrenchment of managers. In addition, there is a positive and significant relationship between DETR and company variables (performance and ownership structure) and corporate governance variables (power structure). However, a company’s size and board of directors’ independence do not affect firms’ DETR. Practical implications The impact highlighted between remuneration and entrenchment of managers and the financial distress of the company is explained by the intention of managers to work for announcing good short-term performance indicators that are most favorable to them. Originality/value The shareholder/manager agency problem can be changed when business performance tends to decline. Certainly, the managerial latitude adopted by the managers is used as an external careerism strategy. Its positive impact on the reduction of the firm’s financial distress can benefit shareholders who aim to sell their securities in the short term.

The extraction of early warning features for the predicting financial distress based on XGboost model and shap framework

The purpose of this paper is to establish a framework for the extraction of early warning risk features for the predicting financial distress based on XGBoost model and SHAP. It is well known that the way to construct early warning risk features to predict financial distress of companies is very important, and by comparing with the traditional statistical methods, though the data-driven machine learning for the financial early warning, modelling has a better performance in terms of prediction accuracy, but it also brings the difficulty such as the one the corresponding model may be not explained well. Recently, eXtreme Gradient Boosting (XGBoost), an ensemble learning algorithm based on extreme gradient boosting, has become a hot topic in the area of machine learning research field due to its strong nonlinear information recognition ability and high prediction accuracy in the practice. In this study, the XGBoost algorithm is used to extract early warning features for the predicting financial distress for listed companies, with 76 financial risk features from seven categories of aspects, and 14 non-financial risk features from four categories of aspects, which are collected to establish an early warning system for the predication of financial distress. With applications, we conduct the empirical testing respect to AUC, KS and Kappa, the numerical results show that by comparing with the Logistic model, our method based on XGBoost model established in this paper has much better ability to predict the financial distress risk of listed companies. Moreover, under the framework of SHAP (SHAPley Additive exPlanations), we are able to give a reasonable explanation for important risk features and influencing ways affecting the financial distress visibly. The results given by this paper show that the XGBoost approach to model early warning features for financial distress does not only preform a better prediction accuracy, but also is explainable, which is significant for the identification of early warning to the financial distress risk for listed companies in the practice.