Purpose: The research objective of this paper is to investigate the relationship between real earnings management (hereafter EM) and non-conforming tax avoidance (hereafter TM). Design/methodology/approach: This study employs multiple linear regression analysis to examine the association between real EM and non-conforming TM. The empirical tests are conducted using a sample of US publicly listed firms over the period 1993–2021. To ensure the robustness of the inferences, we perform a series of additional tests. Findings: The findings reveal a statistically significant positive relationship between real EM and non-conforming TM. This conclusion is further substantiated across a series of robustness checks, which bolster the overall validity of the study. It is noteworthy, however, that the implementation of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (hereafter TCJA) could potentially mitigate the observed positive association. Originality/value: This study contributes to the tax literature by examining the underexplored link between real earnings manipulation and non-conforming tax practices in the US context, thereby complementing the predominant focus on accrual-based EM. Our findings underscore the critical need for investors and regulators to integrate assessments of a firm's real financial reporting aggressiveness into their analytical frameworks. Moving beyond a singular examination of tax reporting practices is essential for enhancing the detection of non-conforming TM behaviors.

Purpose: This investigation explores the increasingly prevalent role of data-driven approaches in hospitality and tourism research, which predominantly relies on expansive datasets from singular sources of social media data. The focus of this study is on uncovering distinct variations across different online travel agencies (OTAs) regarding key analytical metrics, including review topics, sentiment and review length on consumer ratings and their implications for research and practice.Design/methodology/approach: Employing a comparative analysis method, this study analyzed over 11,000 user reviews from a premier boutique hotel in China, gathered from three leading Chinese OTAs. It integrated diverse social media analytics techniques, such as Word Cloud analysis, latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA), traditional regression and PLS structural equation modeling multi-group analysis (MGA) to evaluate review characteristics among the OTAs.Findings: The results reveal significant discrepancies in review topics, sentiments, review lengths and their effects on consumer ratings across the OTAs examined. These findings highlight the risks of relying on a solitary data source for making generalizations. To improve the data-driven research’s validity and reliability in hospitality and tourism, the study advises the adoption of multi-source data for a more holistic understanding of consumer sentiments and behaviors.Originality/value: By pointing out the methodological limitations of present hospitality and tourism research, this paper emphasizes the challenges of a single-source data-driven analytical approach. It suggests several avenues for enhancing the reliability and validity of future research in the field, marking a significant contribution to methodological advancements in hospitality and tourism studies.

Whether green bond issuance reflects genuine environmental commitment or serves as a vehicle for symbolic impression management has remained difficult to assess from corporate disclosure alone. We exploit variation in green bond issuance among S&P 500 firms from 2015 to 2024 to examine its effect on the visual dimension of ESG disclosure. Constructing a Visual-Textual Consistency index that measures semantic alignment between image content and surrounding text in sustainability reports, we find that green bond issuance significantly reduces visual-textual consistency. The effect is robust to Mahalanobis distance matching, event-study pre-trend validation, alternative text-similarity algorithms and so on. We identify a content substitution mechanism: green bond issuers do not expand visual content volume—image counts and report pages remain unchanged—but replace topic-specific imagery with generic visuals. The effect concentrates among large firms, industrial-sector issuers, and first-time issuers, where legitimacy pressure is most acute, and operates in the contemporaneous issuance year. These findings suggest that firms exploit the regulatory vacuum in visual disclosure to manage stakeholder perceptions symbolically, rather than to signal authentic environmental engagement.