In recent years, more and more companies have noted the significance of addressing serious social and environmental issues, and various sustainability strategies have been implemented to ensure sustainable competitive advantage. An urgent issue is how to integrate sustainability strategy-related goals and key performance indicators (KPIs) into performance evaluation and compensation systems, and how to integrate employees’ awareness of environmental protection and social contribution into their daily work. This study examines management tools that can link sustainability strategies with sustainability performance evaluation and compensation systems. Specifically, the balanced scorecard (BSC) is positioned as a management tool for measuring, evaluating, and managing sustainability performance, with a particular focus on the sustainability balanced scorecard (SBSC), which incorporates economic, environmental, and social factors. The purpose of this study is to clarify the role of sustainability performance assessment and management in sustainability management based on previous studies and cases of advanced companies that have introduced SBSC, such as the Generali Group, and to systematically evaluate the functions and usefulness of SBSC as a sustainability performance assessment and management tool. The findings indicate that the SBSC is an effective management tool for improving sustainability performance and implementing sustainability strategies

The purpose of this research is to analyze the financial effectiveness of listed companies in the Indian stock market during the period 2016–2021 to identify which organizations have achieved a combination of technologically viable factors and products that maximize profit, taking into account the limitation of inputs. The methodology used is the data envelopment analysis (DEA), a non parametric procedure that uses the linear programming technique for the evaluation of the relative efficiency of a set of productive units. The results obtained through the DEA model indicate that during the period 2016–2021 there were on average 17 efficient units per year (under the BCC model), representing 26.82% of the total number of listed companies in the Indian stock market; of these companies, six were efficient during all the years of the period analyzed. Moreover, the study concludes that an operational measure such as efficiency is established as an indicator of support for investment decision-making, complementing the traditional indicators of financial analysis. It is expected that this work will open the way to new research in which the DEA methodology is used to evaluate financial efficiency in other stock markets and the consideration of two-stage network DEA models can be considered.

Retraction published on 15 December 2025, see Environmental Research, Engineering and Management 2025 81(4) In recent years, many companies have positioned efforts to decarbonize as a central issue in their environmental strategies. On the other hand, environmental management accounting has so far provided little effective consideration of the information and measures that support the realization of such strategies. Internal carbon pricing (ICP) has the potential to be one of the few management accounting methods that can directly address the above challenges. This study focuses on the importance of ICP as a new challenging issue in environmental management accounting that contributes to decarbonization management and examines the implications of using it and how to set it up. This work examines internal carbon pricing as a mechanism to encourage greenhouse gas (GHG) emission reductions within the framework of management accounting in order to evaluate the direction of the development of environmental management accounting in the decarbonization era. The paper explores the functioning of internal carbon accounting schemes and their impacts through the case of Microsoft Corporation and evaluates the influence on investment decisions of ICPs, which have gained attention in recent years as a tool to encourage GHG reductions. Additionally, the configuration and integration of ICP with management systems such as budgeting are studied. The study demonstrates that ICP provides a new path for environmental management accounting in the age of decarbonization based on these factors.

Purpose The public hospitals are not-for-profit entities, and their purpose is not to generate and distribute profits as a result of business activities. Therefore, in the context of hospital management, where many hospitals are running into losses and improving profitability has become a major issue, it is necessary to study the relationship between operational performance and profitability. Design/Methodology/Approach: In this study, targeting public hospitals, an empirical study was attempted on the correlation between operational performance and profitability. The 303 hospitals were analyzed for the financial years 2022 and 2023. To confirm the validity of the results for the entire group of public hospitals (population), including hospitals other than those subject to this analysis, an uncorrelated test was conducted. Findings: As a result, there was a positive correlation between the volume of surgeries performed and profitability. On the other hand, the shortening of the average length of hospital stay did not lead to an improvement in profitability. Profitability improved as the number of inpatients per physician increased, but there was no correlation between the number of outpatients per physician and profitability. Conclusion: The results of this study suggest the importance of index correction.

This paper seeks to examine how external governance mechanisms related to shareholder protection and creditor rights affect the choice of corporate leverage. The main objective of the study is to examine the relationship between country-level investor protection and the choice of capital structure at the firm level. The sample includes 7490 companies from 40 countries. Data were collected from all publicly listed companies between the years 2013 and 2022, listed in the Van Dijk ORBIS Bureau, based on the fiscal year 2022. This paper opts for the panel data methodology. The results suggest that companies leverage themselves consistently with the Pecking Order Theory. It was observed that the mechanisms associated with the protection of both classes of investors (i.e., shareholders and creditors) significantly influence the capital structure of the companies. The results were robust to several variations in the model studied and indicate that greater investor protection makes firms less likely to use third-party capital. The opposition of insiders (executives and majority shareholders) to debt’s moderating role at their managerial discretion may be the driving force behind this. The differential of the study lies in the distinction between the mechanisms that affect the protection of minority shareholders and those that affect the rights of creditors.

This study was conducted to examine how the abilities of business managers affect the relationship between cost accounting systems and financial performance. The data has been obtained from social welfare organizations. Multiple regression analysis without an interaction term was first conducted as the base model followed by hierarchical multiple regression analysis to verify the increase in explanatory power by adding an interaction term. All independent variables, adjustment variables and control variables except dummy variables were centralized to facilitate the interpretation of the interaction term. A regression diagnosis was conducted after the exclusion of outliers. The statistical analysis environment R was used for the analysis. The findings of the study suggest that among the four functionalities of cost accounting systems, detailed cost ascertainment and reporting frequency may affect organizational performance through interactions with the abilities of business managers. This study may be viewed as a first step in examining the effects of the interaction between the functionality of cost accounting systems and the abilities of business managers on the financial performance of organizations.