‘Sustainable investment’—includes a variety of asset classes selected while caring for the causes of environmental, social, and governance (ESG). It is an investment strategy that seeks to combine social and/ or environmental benefits with financial returns, thus linking investor’s social, ethical, ecological and economic concerns Under certain conditions, these indices also help to attract foreign capital, seeking international participation in the local capital markets. The purpose of this paper is to study whether the sustainable investment alternatives offer better financial returns than the conventional indices from both developed and emerging markets. With an intent to maintain consistency, this paper comparatively analyzes the financial returns of the Thomson Reuters/S-Network global indices, namely the developed markets (excluding US) ESG index—TRESGDX, emerging markets ESG index—TRESGEX, US large-cap ESG index—TRESGUS, Europe ESG index—TRESGEU, and those of the usual markets, namely MSCI world index (MSCI W), MSCI All Country World Equity index (MSCI ACWI), MSCI USA index (MSCI USA), and MSCI Europe Australasia Far East index (MSCI EAFE), MSCI Emerging Markets index (MSCI EM) and MSCI Europe index (MSCI EU). The study also focusses on the inter-linkages between these indices. Daily closing prices of all the benchmark indices are taken for the five-year period of January 2013–December 2017. Line charts and unit-root tests are applied to check the stationary nature of the series; Granger’s causality model, auto-regressive conditional heteroskedasticity (ARCH)-GARCH type modelling is performed to find out the linkages between the markets under study followed by the Johansen’s cointegration test and the Vector Error Correction Model to test the volatility spillover between the sustainable indices and the conventional indices. The study finds that the sustainable indices and the conventional indices are integrated and there is a flow of information between the two investment avenues. The results indicate that there is no significant difference in the performance between sustainable indices and the traditional conventional indices, being a good substitute to the latter. Hence, the financial/investment managers can obtain more insights regarding investment decisions, and the study further suggests that their portfolios should consider both the indices with the perspective of diversifying the risk and hedging, and reap benefits of the same. Additionally, corporate executives shall use it to benchmark their own performance against peers and track news as well.

Since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, countries have concentrated on developing policies that encourage the creation of more innovative products and services in response to the global health emergency. Effective collaboration, communication, and Open Innovation (OI) among government entities, education and research institutions, and the private sector have been critical to each country's overall effectiveness during the economic crisis. The objective of this paper is to examine the relationship between innovation and COVID-19 critically to have a better understanding of future research and practice developments. A systematic evaluation was conducted, analyzing papers on innovation and the COVID-19 pandemic. A total of 218 studies were analyzed to determine the essential research directions in this domain. Our suggested framework is made of aggregate components, which include technology adaption, sustainable development, healthcare, and sustainable economic performance. These components form the basis for the identification of emerging research hotspots in the field of COVID and innovation, as well as frame the COVID-19 issue as an opportunity to raise awareness about the crucial role of innovation in business and society at large.

There is emergent literature that converges from neuroscience and entrepreneurship research, but the definitions and interlinkages are still inconsistent. We conduct a systematic literature review of 167 papers on the interface between neuroscience and entrepreneurship to address this. We observe the literature trends examining the interlinkages between neuroscience and entrepreneurial intention through six antecedents, namely - molecular neuroscience, systems neuroscience, behavioral neuroscience, cognitive neuroscience, social neuroscience, and computational neuroscience. Our findings suggest that entrepreneurial intention impacts entrepreneurial activity through five factors, including (1) opportunity recognition, (2) evaluation and risk-taking, (3) entrepreneurial cognition, (4) entrepreneurial behavior, and (5) entrepreneurial decision-making. From our discussions, the links among the neural factors affecting entrepreneurship are identified, and a research agenda highlighting a pathway for future studies is proposed.