Search

In this paper we address the relationship between happiness and acts of corruption and shadow economy in Romania. From our survey conducted on a sample of 101 respondents from Romania (on March 2020), we find that Romanian people do not link happiness to material issues in particular, but rather they see it as a consequence of having families, professional and spiritual fulfillment, while money and property are last in this ranking. The average income that would make the respondents happy is on average of 5,223 lei (about 1,100 Euro) per month, an amount that they consider necessary to cover the basic needs that influence their development. Our findings reveal that the most corruption practices encountered in the public institutions refer to receiving money and gifts for services to which people are entitled followed by receiving money and gifts to favor someone. However, corruption and shadow economy are not perceived as being very relevant in fully influencing the level of happiness they perceive.

The aim of our research is to check if public services’ digitalization has an influence on economic and financial crime. We split economic and financial crime into its main forms and measured them using relevant indicators. For public services’ digitalization we consider indicators regarding online services’ quality, telecommunication infrastructure and e-government involvement. We also consider control variables that might affect the nexus between the main variables. Our sample comprise 185 countries, being split by developed and developing countries. Our processings are done in Eviews7, using Panel Least Squared Method. We test the relationship between public services’ digitalization and each component of economic and financial crime. The conclusions show a decrease of economic and financial crime with an increase of public services’ digitalization. In some particular cases, for developing countries we can observe a slight increase of the phenomenon. Our study completes the specialized literature because it includes a wider sample and a more complex set of indicators. It can also be very useful in developing national strategies and policies regarding the economic and financial crime issue. Digitalization is not a cause for concern when law is respected. If we have functional policies, technology will become citizen’s most accessible tool.

The manipulation of the information presented through financial statements could represent a significant red flag for suspected fraud. In our paper, we investigated the extent to which the Romanian companies resort to manipulation of information data presented through the reported annual financial statements. For this purpose, we used a group consisting of 62 non-financial companies listed on the Bucharest Stock Exchange for the analyzed period 2017-2018. The results of our study show that a majority percentage of the Romanian companies (approx. 84%) resort to manipulation of information provided through financial statements. Following the analysis carried out by activity fields, the results show that the companies activating in the fields of tourism, constructions, trade and transport resort to the manipulation of financial statements in the percent of 100%, followed by the companies activating in the field of production (86%) and services (50%). Our results are extremely useful to the users of financial information who must acknowledge the risks that they are exposed to in their decision-making process.

The aim of this paper consists in providing a general overview of the notion of intellectual capital as a key to maximizing the corporate performance. Following the researches carried out, we present the delimitations of the intellectual capital in relation with human capital, relational capital and structural capital. In terms of its measurement, we focus on a question which could be a solid base for the next studies: “Can intellectual capital be evaluated?” In this regard, a number of methods (direct and methods based on assets returns), generic model and individual company models were presented, concluding in this way with a hierarchy in terms of utility and their importance.

This research comes to empirical investigate whether the country‟s levels of corruption may be explained by some behavioral factors such as culture, tax morale, trust, religion or happiness. For this purpose, a cross-countries survey of 148 countries is used. The findings document that power distance, trust in legal system, happiness and religion are the most important behavioral determinants of the corruption, explaining about 50 % from the level of corruption around the world. A higher power distance, a lower level of trust in legal system, a lower level of happiness (measured by subjective well-being) and a higher level of religiosity conduct to a higher level of corruption. The findings are important for the policy-makers in order to include the non-economic factors in the analysis of corruption behavior of the people belong to a country, and thus to adopt the most appropriate decisions to fight against this phenomenon.

Sustainable development has gained the attention of researchers worldwide and is becoming an important topic, especially in relation to corporate governance principles. This study investigates the influence of corporate governance on sustainable development in a sample of 185 countries over 2005–2020 using a panel linear regression model. Separate analyses are also conducted on subsamples of high- and low-income countries. Our findings highlight the positive influence of corporate governance, as measured by board efficacy, the strength of audits and reports, and digitalisation, on sustainable development, as measured by the Human Development Index, Human Capital Index, and Environmental Performance Index. Moreover, we find a higher positive and marginal effect of the influence of corporate governance on sustainable development for low-income countries than for high-income countries. The robustness checks performed using variables related to the happiness index, women in top management positions, and technology adoption verify our results. Our findings are important for managers and policymakers to consolidate sustainable development through the incentive brought about by high-quality corporate governance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study tests the asymmetric impact of the tax burden structures under the forms of direct, indirect, and social contributions, upon the shadow economy. For this purpose, a panel dataset analysis of the 27 European Union (EU) Member States is conducted over the 2005–2018 time period. Our study supports the existence of a U-shaped relationship between tax burden and shadow economy only for the case of direct taxes, while for indirect taxes and social contributions, an inverted U-shaped relationship is validated. We also highlight different values of the resilience thresholds for all categories of taxes and contributions among the new EU members compared to the old ones. For direct taxes, the threshold beyond which the level of shadow economy increases is 2.61 times lower for new EU countries than for the old countries. In addition, both for the new and old EU countries, a level of indirect taxes beyond a threshold of 15.04% and 16.52%, respectively, would determine a decrease in the level of the shadow economy. The robustness checks performed using many control variables consolidate our results. Our findings are important for policy-makers to find the level of resilience of various states under different types of tax burden structures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]