The role of sustainable development in the export intensity of small and medium‐size enterprises (SMEs) represents an open research question. We consider sustainable development through the environmental, social, and governance (ESG) dimensions as well as via firms’ innovative activity indicators. Our objective is to reveal the sustainability determinants of export intensity of SMEs in emerging markets subject to financial constraints, which is one of the major obstacles for SMEs. Our sample is based on the 2018–2020 Business Environment Enterprise Performance Survey data. The Heckman model allows us to reveal the factors relevant for SMEs to gain access to foreign markets under the control of financial constraints specific for SMEs. We also analyze the determinants of the SMEs’ share of direct exports in revenue. Our results demonstrate that innovative activity and corporate social responsibility facilitate entry to foreign markets, while equity concentration is a major deterrent. In particular, we reveal a significant positive effect of research and development investment on export intensity. Our findings highlight the complex nature of the interrelations between the SMEs’ share of direct exports in revenue and ESG consciousness. We find that other significant factors are political links of the top management, the gender composition of production and administrative units, employee training facilities, and ownership structure.

We investigate the influence of moves in oil prices on exchange rates of Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore and Thailand (the ASEAN-5 countries). We disentangle oil shocks, representing them by three components: demand shock, supply shock and risk shock, and examine their impact on the ASEAN-5 exchange rates by employing high-/low-volatility Markov regime-switching regressions for the period 2006 to Beckmann, Czudaj, and Arora 2020. We find that demand shocks make forex rates increase for net oil-producing as well as net oil-consuming economies. The impacts of supply shocks on forex rates for most economies are rather low. The risk shocks lead to depreciating effects on the ASEAN-5 currencies, supporting the notion that the open-oriented nature of ASEAN-5 economies makes them susceptible to constant fluctuations in the global oil market.

This paper analyzes the risk-return characteristics of socially responsible investing by employing a time-varying capital gain and Sharpe ratio analysis for various investment horizons. We employ the MSCI ESG (environmental, social and governance) leaders indices in ten markets encompassing Australia, Canada, Europe, Japan, UK, USA, China, India, Russia, and South Africa. Our sample ranges from 2007–2020. We document that ESG investments have very desirable return and hedging attributes for investors in these markets, and especially so in the USA and emerging markets.

The wavelet approach covering simultaneously the time and frequency domains is employed to study the impact of the Covid-19 coverage in mass media on the performance of the Dow Jones Sukuk investment grade total return indices. The overall coherence level for the media-coverage – sukuk pairs is found to increase with the investment horizon. Multiple time-frequency regions with low level of coherence, observable along the Covid-19 systemic crisis, imply attractive diversification attributes of investing in Islamic fixed-income securities especially in times of financial stress and turmoil. We investigate coherence and phase difference patterns, which differ for distinct maturity buckets of the Sukuk indices, further highlighting their potentiality for the downside risk hedge, workable under economic and financial distress.

We propose an original approach to constructing an index of efficiency of FDI transformation into steady economic and innovation growth. As factors of efficient transformation we consider many institutional indicators. We rank countries on the sample of 31 developed and developing economies. The results of bivariate and multivariate Granger tests show that FDI causes economic development and intellectual capital in a number of indicators. With nonparametric DEA method and Malmquist Index we identify countries at the efficiency frontier by the quality of FDI management. Change in efficiency over time along the IC growth path is highly influenced by government effectiveness.

In this study, using AI, we empirically examine the irrational behaviour, specifically attention-driven trading and emotion-driven trading such as consensus trading, of retail investors in an emerging stock market. We used a neural network to assess the tone of messages on social media platforms and proposed a novel Hype indicator that integrates metrics of investor attention and sentiment. The sample of messages, which are written in Russian with slang expressions, was retrieved from a unique dataset of social network communication of investors in the Russian stock market. Applying different portfolio designs, we evaluated the effectiveness of the new Hype indicator against the factors of momentum, volatility, and trading volume. We found the possibility of building a profitable trading strategy based on the Hype indicator over a 6-month time horizon. Over short periods, the Hype indicator allows investors to earn more by buying stocks of large companies, and over «longer» periods, this indicator tends to perform better for illiquid stocks of small companies. As consensus trading tends to produce negative returns, the investment strategy of ‘Go against the crowd’ proves rewarding in the medium term of 3 months.