This study applies meta-regression analysis to aggregate a sample of 1126 empirical estimates of the stock market reaction to soccer matches collected from 37 primary studies. Our results indicate that winning a match is not associated with significant return effects for both national teams and individual clubs. In the case of lost matches, we find strong evidence for publication bias, i.e. negative returns are systematically overrepresented causing a biased picture of the true soccer match effect. After correcting for this bias, the mean return after losses by national teams becomes statistically insignificant and accounts for only $-5$ basis points. In the case of individual clubs, the corrected impact of a loss is a significant $-39$ basis points effect. In a further analysis, we identify various aspects of study design like regional differences, time period under examination and the design of empirical analysis to be responsible for the wide variation in previous study outcomes. Overall, our findings provide evidence against the hypothesis that stock markets are driven by sports sentiment in the case of national teams. Due to the existence of strong asymmetry in the returns after wins and losses of individual clubs, behavioural explanations cannot be fully ruled out.

This research explores the relationship between Hofstede’s femininity cultural dimension of quality of life and the masculinity cultural dimension of drive for success manifested by materialistic wealth by investigating the market value of the publicly traded firms appearing on the Dow Jones Sustainability Indices (DJSIs). The firms added to the DJSIs between the years 2010–2019 in countries with the femininity cultural dimension indicated by scores of ≤42, were selected for the first part of this study. In addition, France, with a masculinity score of 43 and Japan, with the highest masculinity score of 92, were chosen for comparison with the results from the countries with the femininity cultural dimension. The findings of this study indicate that companies in developed and emerging countries with the femininity cultural dimension show significant positive impact on their market values when added to the DJSIs. The publicly traded firms in France show a significant negative impact on their market values when added to the DJSIs. On the other hand, Japanese companies on the addition lists of DJSIs show a significant positive impact on their market values, despite Japan having the highest Hofstede masculinity score, a potential sign of cultural change in Japan.

The aim of this study is to analyze the interaction between capital structure decisions and risk management decisions as well as the channels through which they add value to firms. Competing theories are considered in an integrated path model, which we test by means of meta‐analytic structural equation modelling (MASEM). This meta‐analysis is based on 6,312 reported results, which are manually collected from 411 empirical studies. We find that capital structure mediates the relation between corporate financial hedging and firm value. In this regard, active risk management positively affects leverage by providing greater debt capacities. Furthermore, leverage has a negative impact on firm value. Hence, capital structure and financial hedging decisions appear rather as complements instead of substitutes. This implies that managers should leave additional debt capacities unused and instead use additional internal funds arising from active risk management to carry out profitable projects and research and development activities. Overall, corporate hedging is found to especially add value to a firm by lowering bankruptcy risks and underinvestment risks.