Ирина Васильевна Ивашковская

Inclusive growth has increasingly emerged as a central framework for understanding how firms can align economic performance with social inclusion and environmental responsibility, particularly in emerging markets characterized by institutional volatility. In the context of geopolitical shocks and economic sanctions, such as those faced by Russia during 2022–2023, the normative meaning of inclusive growth is redefined toward prioritizing employment stability, industrial continuity, and strategic resilience at the firm level. This study aims to develop a systematic and transparent firm-level measure of inclusive growth that integrates strategic resilience with long-term business model potential. It further seeks to empirically assess cross-firm heterogeneity in inclusive growth performance within the Russian metallurgical and mining sector under geopolitical disruption conditions. This study constructs a composite Inclusive Growth Index using publicly available financial and non-financial disclosures, combining indicator normalization, variance-based weighting, and geometric aggregation. The index is applied to a panel of major Russian metallurgical and mining companies for the period 2021–2024 to evaluate their strategic resilience, business model potential, and industry-level dynamics under sanctions. The results reveal substantial heterogeneity in inclusive growth performance across firms, with higher index values being associated with stronger strategic resilience and more stable operational outcomes. The analysis further identifies a divergence between improving resilience and declining business model potential during 2022–2024, indicating a trade-off between short-term stabilization and long-term inclusive growth capabilities under the geopolitical stress. The findings suggest that inclusive growth at the firm level in a sanctioned emerging market context follows a distinct sovereignty-oriented logic in which employment stability and operational continuity take precedence over long-term innovation and governance enhancement. Overall, the proposed Inclusive Growth Index provides a robust analytical framework for assessing corporate adaptation to structural shocks and informing managerial and policy decisions in emerging market economies.

This paper investigates Artificial Intelligence’s (AI) systemic impact on corporate Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) performance. Analyzing Chinese-listed companies from 2013 to 2022, we find that AI adoption significantly promotes ESG outcomes. Both ‘soft’ regulation (investor attention) and ‘hard’ regulation (environmental regulation) significantly strengthen this contribution. Notably, investor attention exhibits a complex threshold effect: at lower levels of attention, AI adoption negatively impacts ESG performance, suggesting that firms may prioritize efficiency over sustainability in the absence of public scrutiny. The facilitative effect only emerges once investor attention surpasses a critical threshold, highlighting AI’s ‘double-edged sword’ nature. For ‘hard’ regulation, environmental regulation positively moderates AI’s impact on environmental and governance performance but lacks a similar effect on social performance. Furthermore, AI primarily drives social and governance goals in non-state-owned enterprises (non-SOEs), while its impact in state-owned enterprises (SOEs) is concentrated in the environmental dimension. These results underscore that AI’s transformative potential is contingent upon regulatory frameworks and ownership-specific institutional logics.

Ecosystem-based business models have received significant attention and praise in both business and research literature. Endeavours in building ecosystems sometimes prove successful, with firms transitioning to ecosystems enjoying valuation multiples significantly higher than their conventional peers. In practice, this entails firms expanding beyond their core offerings, such as a bank venturing into e-commerce. However, despite the evident interest in ecosystem-based business models, up to 85% of such ecosystems ultimately fail. Despite these notable failure rates, there has been limited discussion in research literature regarding the composition of businesses that yield reliable results within ecosystems. In this paper,we first propose a “Hook-Engage-Monetize (HEM)” framework for understanding ecosystem business composition. We apply this framework to nine case studies of successful and less successful ecosystems from nine different countries. Our analysis demonstrates the potential of HEM as a tool for selecting businesses for ecosystems and for guiding future quantitative financial research in this area.

Study examines the problems of business ecosystems, whose effectiveness and sustainability are determined by the organization of cooperation of all its participants using digital tools. The purpose of the research is to develop an index of digital ecosystem sustainability that would reflect changes in the value of the company. The article defines the main characteristics of digital business ecosystems by adapting the taxonomy of digital ecosystems to the Russian market and measuring the sustainability of Russian companies as Yandex and VK Group by using the digital ecosystem sustainability index (DESIn) that was developed by the authors for determining the strategic position of companies in the market. The authors identified the main classification features of digital ecosystems and measured their stability using financial and non-financial indicators as part of the DESIn index. The results of the research and the developed index of digital ecosystem sustainability can be used by Russian companies for developing their strategies, analysing their competitive positions, and choosing the optimal directions for digital ecosystem development.

In the current economic landscape, businesses are challenged by the dual imperatives of digital transformation and sustainability goals. While digital transformation is often heralded as a catalyst for innovation, its potential negative effects on green innovation remain underexplored. This study fills in this gap by analyzing 1443 listed companies on the Shanghai Stock Exchange main board between 2013 and 2022, focusing on the mechanisms by which digital transformation impacts green innovation and on the moderated role of environmental, social, and governance (ESG) performance. Our findings reveal that digital transformation hinders green innovation by increasing financing constraints. However, good ESG performance mitigates these negative impacts by alleviating financing constraints, thereby fostering green innovation. Our findings hold up against endogeneity tests by applying instrumental variable methods. Notably, the effect of digital transformation and ESG differs significantly between state-owned enterprises (SOEs) and non-state-owned enterprises (non-SOEs). While non-SOEs experience more pronounced challenges, ESG also demonstrates a stronger moderating role, unlike in SOEs, where institutional advantages offset some of these constraints. These findings enhance the understanding of dual transformation challenges, offering practical implications for aligning digital and green strategies in diverse organizational contexts.

Brand value remains a crucial element for listed companies striving to sustain competitiveness amid the double-cycle economic context. Using panel data from Chinese A-share listed companies spanning 2017–2021, this study employs a threshold effect model to probe into the boundary conditions of the complex relationship between corporate social responsibility (CSR) and brand value. It empirically investigates the role of board characteristics in shaping the brand value of listed companies through their involvement in CSR, considering the dimensions of board size and board shareholding ratio. The results reveal that a commitment to social responsibility enhances brand value up to a certain point. However, prolonged and extensive resource investment can divert the company’s focus, leading to a detrimental impact on brand value. This manifests as a non-strict inverted U-shaped threshold effect between CSR and brand value. Furthermore, the study explores variations in board size and board shareholding ratio, uncovering that board members’ perspectives on CSR commitment are subject to distinct constraints. This dynamic results in a non-linear, symmetric U-shaped relationship between CSR and brand value-initially negative and subsequently positive. The study explores whether board characteristics intervene in CSR decision-making and thus contribute to brand value, with a view to guiding listed companies’ board governance practices and optimizing the path to brand value enhancement.

Corporate resilience has emerged as a prominent focus in international studies, particularly in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic that unfolded in 2019. This attention has been amplified by the structural shifts in the business models of Russian companies, prompted by imposed sanctions, thereby accentuating the need for comprehensive academic exploration of resilience, its driving forces, and adaptive turnaround strategies, especially in the era of cancel culture. Despite the heightened significance of resilience, the drivers underlying it during structural crises remain insufficiently studied. This paper addresses this gap by employing a combination of quantitative methods applied to a sample of publicly traded Russian companies spanning the years 2012 to 2022 (first half), alongside case studies. Our contribution to the literature is manifold. Firstly, our application of Altman’s Z-score model to publicly traded companies unveils the industries with the highest and lowest resilience across the Russian market from a historical perspective. Secondly, we assert that fluctuations in the degree of resilience during turbulent times, as captured by the Z-score, offer a more adequate evaluation compared to popular market-based metrics like total shareholder returns (TSR). Thirdly, our findings reveal that higher credit ratings and state ownership have no evident impact on the degree of resilience. Conversely, the professional background of CEOs is correlated with firm performance and plays a significant role in determining company resilience amid cancel culture challenges.

We investigate how different personal traits of a chief executive officer (CEO) influence value creation in one of the largest emerging capital markets in Russia. Our research model considers several components of human capital of a CEO. Moreover, we include CEO’s behavioral biases looking at overconfidence measured by industry adjusted ratio of capital expenditures and narcissism captured by the analysis of CEO’s photos following previous academic research approaches. The CEO power is applied to understand its impact over value creation and possible mitigating effect. Our sample consists of 111 Russian publicly traded companies and 235 CEOs for 8 years (from 2013 to 2020). We apply economic profit criteria to measure corporate performance with economic value added (EVA) which captures the spread between actual return on capital derived from financial reports and overall cost of capital based on the risks of a company collected from Bloomberg. We use first-order differences in company’s contribution to EVA after adjustments to the industry and overall market contributions to EVA for the sample. We find empirical evidence that CEO’s human capital affects value creation measured by first-order differences to industry adjusted EVA yearly. Furthermore, the CEO power has positive impact over value creation in Russian corporations while behavioral biases such as overconfidence ad narcissism do not have significant relationship with the changes in EVA.