The sponsorship of major sporting events involves an ongoing commitment by business partners (sponsors) who need to evaluate the returns of their investments. This article addresses this evaluation by employing event study analysis and bootstrapping in order to assess the market value of business sponsorship of the Olympic Games 2004. The events tested are the announcement of the Athens 2004 Olympic Games sponsorships and the opening ceremony. The empirical results indicate the marginal positive impact that sponsorship announcements cause in international and national sponsors’ stock returns. Sponsorship announcements are more influential for small size firms’ stock returns since they react more positive compared to larger ones.

This article investigates the capital structure dynamics of European SMEs by assessing the impact of firm-specific, institutional, and macroeconomic factors over the period 2005–2015, including the European Sovereign Debt Crisis (ESDC). In this setup, we perform a dynamic panel data analysis, along with several model specifications and robustness tests on listed SMEs of EU-28, dividing them into firm categories (micro, small, and medium) and country groups (core, periphery, high technology, and new EU member countries). We find that the effect of capital structure determinants do not differ significantly across size and country groups. The results suggest that profitability, asset structure, and size have been the driving forces of listed SME’s leverage, regardless of the size of the companies and the country group. At a macroeconomic and institutional level, taxation is the most significant variable for all the subgroups. Finally, the ESDC seems to increase the leverage of the listed SMEs in the periphery and the new member states countries, leaving the core countries practically unaffected. Cet article examine la dynamique de la structure de capital des PME européennes en évaluant l’impact des facteurs propres aux entreprises, institutionnels et macroéconomiques, pendant la période 2005–2015, y compris celle de la crise de la dette souveraine européenne. Dans cette configuration, nous procédons à une analyse de données de panel, ainsi qu’à des tests de spécification et de robustesse de plusieurs modèles sur des PME cotées dans les 28 pays de l’UE, en les divisant par catégories d’entreprises (micro, petites et moyennes) et par groupes de pays (centraux, périphériques, à la pointe de la technologie, et nouveaux États membres de l’UE). Nos résultats révèlent que les effets des déterminants de la structure de capital ne diffèrent pas de manière significative d’un type d’entreprise ou d’un groupe de pays à l’autre. Ils suggèrent également que la rentabilité, la structure des actifs et la taille sont les forces motrices de l’influence des PME cotées, indépendamment de la taille des entreprises et du groupe de pays. Aux plans macroéconomique et institutionnel, la fiscalité est la variable la plus significative pour tous les sous-groupes. Enfin, la crise de la dette souveraine européenne semble accroître l’influence des PME cotées dans les pays périphériques et les nouveaux États membres, laissant les pays centraux pratiquement non-affectés.

Bubbles are usually chaotic but can be predictable, provided their formation matches the log periodic power law (LPPL) with unique stylized facts. We investigated Green Bubble behaviour in the stock prices of a selection of stocks during the COVID-19 pandemic, namely, those with the highest market capitalization from a basket of North American and European green energy or clean tech companies and the S&P Global Clean Energy Index. Moreover, the biggest Exchange Traded Fund (TAN) by market capitalization was also considered. The examined period is from 31 December 2019 to 11 October 2021, during which we detected 35 Green Bubbles. All of these followed the LPPL signature while calibrated through the 2013 reformulated LPPL model. In addition, the average drawdown emerged as four times that of the regular S&P-500 stock index (108% vs. 27%) under stressed conditions, such as the COVID-19 pandemic (stylized fact). Finally, the aftermaths of Green Bubbles, unlike regular bubbles, are not destructive, as these bubbles increase economic activity and infrastructure spending and are hence beneficial for holistic growth (described as Social Bubble Hypothesis). We document that there are benefits in adapting greener and more sustainable business models in energy production. Green and sustainable finance offers benefits and opportunities for stock exchanges, especially for energy stocks. As a result, many businesses are focusing on sustainability and adopting an eco-friendly business model, which helps the environment, helps sustainability and attracts investors.

Purpose: This study analyzes the inflation hedging of Islamic and conventional equities by employing 26 indices for the period ranging from January 1996 till August 2018. The authors investigate the decoupling hypothesis for Islamic versus conventional equities across various investment horizons.Design/methodology/approach: The authors employ a vector autoregressive framework coupled with bootstrapping procedure to compute inflation hedging measures. The hedging measures employed account for the inflation hedging capacity in terms of hedging effectiveness as well as the cost of hedging (efficiency). The authors account for various investment horizons ranging from one month to ten years.Findings: Although, the authors do not find consistent evidence for the decoupling hypothesis of Islamic and conventional equities in terms of their inflation hedging capacity. However, the authors document that certain Islamic equity indices can be employed to effectively hedge against the risk of inflation.Originality/value: The main contribution of this study is that the existing literature on the comparative performance of Islamic versus conventional equities against inflation risk is sparse. The purpose of this study is to analyze the inflation hedging attributes of Islamic versus conventional equities, that is, whether Islamic equities render better real returns than their conventional counterparts. It will contribute to the growing literature on the comparison between Islamic and conventional equities by documenting the real return attributes of these two, apparently different, assets. A further contribution is that in order to account for the different investment horizons for different types of investors, this study will quantify the real return attributes of Islamic and conventional equities for short-, medium- and long-term investors.