Purpose: Financial well-being among young adults is an emerging and important field of research. This study aims to shed light on the current insights and future directions for young adults’ financial well-being research. Design/methodology/approach: A systematic review was performed using (1) the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses protocol to curate the corpus and (2) the bibliometric-content analysis technique to review that corpus on young adults’ financial well-being research. Findings: Young adults’ financial well-being is influenced by contextual factors such as changes in macroeconomic environment, market factors, technological advancement and financial social comparisons, as well as personal factors such as sociodemographics, personality traits and values, skills and attitudes, financial practices, financial socialization, lifestyles and early life experiences, and subjective financial situation and mental health. Noteworthily, interest in this field is growing with a plethora of journals, countries, authors, theories, methods and measures. Research limitations/implications: Several noteworthy gaps exist in the literature on young adults’ financial well-being, which include the lack of international collaboration, the lack of interventions to improve young adults’ financial well-being, the limited range of theoretical lenses, the limited consensus on measuring young adults’ financial well-being, the limited understanding of contextual factors, and the inconsistencies between personal factors and young adults’ financial well-being. Potential ways forward are proposed to address these gaps. Originality/value: This review contributes to a seminal synthesis of young adults’ financial well-being research, providing both retrospective insights and prospective ways forward.

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to systematically review the literature on corporate governance and sustainability integration in identifying the main rigidity, infirmity and gaps in the current literature, and also to mention future research paths.Design/methodology/approach: A systematic literature review of existing international papers is used through quantitative and qualitative approach by selecting 27 articles published in Scopus.Findings: The review suggests although integration of governance into sustainability is interpreted differently in a geographical area, vision, mission and leadership are the most significant drivers of sustainability framework dealing corporate governance. Despite the limitation which is related to the choice of number and type of keywords and journals, outcomes and the interpretation, generalization and application of results, sustainability frameworks suggest a number of avenues for investors, policy makers and future market scenario which will increase the efficiency of companies.Research limitations/implications: This research uses limited number of reviews by the common features of Scopus search as previous studies. This review study reflects corporate governance to sustainability models and provides opportunities to researchers for a more in-depth investigation into the theoretical advancement and joint work of sustainability and corporate governance which better inform strategies and implementations of governmental structures.Originality/value: This paper undertakes a significant thorough systematic review for sustainability integration with corporate governance literature. It gives a written work review and reference index from1995 to 2017, useful for both academics and professionals.

While there is little evidence on the relationship between board gender diversity and internal control weaknesses (ICWs), existing studies are based on the U.S. data. We extend the literature by examining the relationship between female directors on audit committees (ACs) and ICWs in Iran, a developing country with different cultural and corporate governance characteristics from western countries, which are the focus of most previous studies. We further split financial expert directors on ACs by gender and examine whether female and male financial experts on ACs are associated with ICWs. Using hand-collected data of 181 unique firms on the Tehran Stock Exchange (TSE) over the period 2013–2018, we find that firms with female representation on the AC are less likely to have ICWs. We also find that female financial experts on ACs are associated with fewer ICWs, whereas male financial experts on ACs are not significantly associated with ICWs. These results remain robust after performing several sensitivity tests. Overall, our results are interesting and indicate that the presence of female directors has a positive effect on corporate outcomes even in such an environment that is expected to yield different results. Our study has practical implications for Iranian regulators about gender-diversity policies.

This study examines the impact of CEO attributes on R&D intensity and the mediating role of environmental, social, and governance (ESG) practice on the aforementioned relationship. We concentrate on international companies listed on New York Stock Exchange (NYSE), from six geographical regions, which followed ESG practices, adapted from the international standards of Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) from 2016 to 2017. Our results show a significant positive association between CEO education and R&D intensity; indicating that R&D intensity is higher when CEOs have a higher level of education. Our findings also report that CEO duality is negatively associated with R&D intensity. However, CEO age is not associated with R&D intensity. Further, we suggest that CEO education and CEO duality have partial mediation effects through mediation path analysis, and that the CSR committee positively influences the proposed model. The present study contributes to the prior literature by examining the mediating effect of ESG practice on the link between different CEOs’ attributes and R&D intensity.

Despite the major investigations in prior studies for direct links among board diversity and corporate performance, the literature has not covered many indirect associations among them. This article analyzes the association between board diversity (gender and foreigner) and corporate performance by focusing on the mediating role of corporate social responsibility reporting (CSRR) and the moderated mediation role of South East Asian (ASEAN) countries through new institutional theory, which consists of legitimacy and institutional theories. According to a sample of 264 corporates from all industries by using GRI G3 guideline from 2011 to 2013, we found that foreign and gender diversity have partial and full mediation effects in ASEAN countries. The main conclusion of the current article indicates that board diversity affects directly with corporate performance and indirectly with CSRR through moderated path analysis. The implications are valuable for academics, managers, and policy makers who are interested to determine the impact of intervening variables on the board diversity and corporate performance relationship in ASEAN countries.