This paper defends an account of moral worth. Moral worth is a status that some, but not all, morally right actions have. Unlike with merely right actions, when an agent performs a morally worthy action, she is necessarily creditworthy for doing the right thing. First, I argue that two dominant views of moral worth have been unable to fully capture this necessary connection. On one view, an action is morally worthy if and only if its agent is motivated by the (...) features of the action that make it right. On the other, an action is morally worthy if and only if its agent is motivated by the action’s rightness itself. Neither of these views captures the connection between moral worth and creditworthiness, because each view leaves room for cases of accidentally doing the right thing. Next, I develop a new account, which I call the Guise of Moral Reasons Account. On my account, morally worthy actions are right actions that are motivated by moral reasons as such. This account rules out cases of accidentally doing the right thing, thus capturing the necessary connection between moral worth and creditworthiness for doing the right thing. (shrink)

A view of knowledge—what I call the "Deserving Credit View of Knowledge" —found in much of the recent epistemological literature, particularly among so-called virtue epistemologists, centres around the thesis that knowledge is something for which a subject deserves credit. Indeed, this is said to be the central difference between those true beliefs that qualify as knowledge and those that are true merely by luck—the former, unlike the latter, are achievements of the subject and are thereby creditable to her. (...) Moreover, it is often further noted that deserving credit is what explains the additional value that knowledge has over merely lucky true belief. In this paper, I argue that the general conception of knowledge found in the DCVK is fundamentally incorrect. In particular, I show that deserving credit cannot be what distinguishes knowledge from merely lucky true belief since knowledge is not something for which a subject always deserves credit. (shrink)

In this paper I'm interested in the prospects for the Right Reasons theory of creditworthiness. The Right Reasons theory says that what it is for an agent to be creditworthy for X-ing is for that agent to X for the right reasons. The paper has a negative goal and a positive goal. The negative goal is to show that a class of Right Reasons theories are doomed. These theories all have a Conceptualization Condition on acting for the right reasons. Conceptualization (...) Conditions demand that agents who act for the right reasons deploy or be able to deploy certain normative concepts in acting. I argue that views of this type run into a host of overintellectualization problems. The positive aim is to argue for my Right Reasons view, which appeals to know-how to avoid overintellectualization. (shrink)

This study examines the impact of China’s social credit system (CSCS) on mitigating corporate greenwashing behavior and advancing corporate sustainability. Designed to cultivate a ‘sincerity culture,’ the CSCS significantly elevates social trust and acts as a transformative influence within corporate settings to promote genuine sustainability efforts. Employing a staggered difference-in-differences model on a panel of Chinese listed firms from 2011 to 2020, our findings indicate that firms headquartered in CSCS pilot cities experience marked increases in trust and reductions in (...) greenwashing. The curbing effect of CSCS on greenwashing is more salient among small firms, those with limited analyst coverage, and firms in highly competitive industries or cities with lax environmental regulations. Improved information asymmetry, eased financing needs, and enhanced media attention emerge as three key mechanisms driving these results. Additionally, CSCS enforcement contributes to enhanced corporate sustainability outcomes such as greater customer loyalty, higher sales profit growth, more environmental investments, and lower carbon emissions. Overall, our evidence shows that firms in pilot cities benefit from more stable and cooperative relationships with various key stakeholders, who co-enforce sustainability norms. We conclude by discussing the moral ambivalence of enforcing sincerity, the ordo-ethical implications of the CSCS, and its potential to advance corporate sustainability and responsibility. (shrink)

Sustainability initiatives and Indigenous realities are increasingly engaging with each other across the world. Developed through diverse frameworks and supported by public and private actors, these initiatives involve claims of conservation and development. However, notions of development often assume common ground between Indigenous realities and sustainability initiatives, neglecting foundational differences that can lead to contemporary forms of colonization and violence. In this article, we explore how sustainability initiatives and Indigenous realities engage with each other by empirically examining the Paiter Suruí (...) Carbon Credit REDD+ Project in Rondônia, Brazil. Drawing from a political ontology lens, we analyze moments of engagement between Indigenous realities and external actors, through which we theorize what we call ethical imposition and ontological violence—the disruption of foundational modes of life due to the unilateral enforcement of one’s own ethical framework onto others. We argue that despite the potential benefits of such programs, sustainability initiatives can ultimately lead to the disruption of Indigenous ways of life through the imposition of external ethical frameworks. (shrink)

Contributorship refers to indicating who did what in a project, going beyond a simple list of authors. In scholarly journal articles about a project, the Contributor Roles Taxonomy (CRediT) has become a popular way to provide individual contribution information, often with accompanying machine-readable metadata. While CRediT is used by hundreds of scientific journals, the official version of CRediT exists only in English. To support scientific publishers and researchers writing in other languages, we have created translations of the (...) fourteen CRediT roles and their descriptions into thirty-six languages. To ensure high quality, at least one speaker fluent in the target language drafted the translation, with additional involvement of a second fluent person. Because hundreds of scientific journals publish non-English work, the use of our translations could improve the recognition of the associated researchers’ contributions. We have contacted relevant publishers and academic organizations to make them more aware of CRediT, of our translations, and of contributorship generally. To conclude, we discuss the potential for CRediT and other ontologies to be applied more broadly, for example to facilitate greater recognition of people who are not co-authors but are named in Acknowledgments sections. (shrink)

In recent years, scholars in the social sciences and humanities have turned their attention to how the rise of digital technologies is reshaping political life in contemporary society. Here, we analyze this issue by distinguishing between two classification technologies typical of pre-digital and digital eras that differently constitute the relationship between individuals and groups. In class-based systems, characteristic of the pre-digital era, one’s status as an individual is gained through membership in a group in which salient social identities are shared (...) in common with other group members. In attribute-based systems, characteristic of the digital era, one’s status as an individual is determined by virtue of possession of a set of attributes that need not be shared with others. We argue that differences between these two types of classification technologies have important implications for how persons attach (or fail to attach) to groups, and therefore what kinds of political mobilization are possible. We illustrate this argument by examining contention over the use of gender as a variable in the pricing of risk in insurance and credit – two markets in which individuals directly encounter class-based and attribute-based systems of classification, respectively. (shrink)

Scholars belong to multiple communities of credit simultaneously. When these communities disagree about a scholarly achievement’s credit assignment, this raises a puzzle for decision and game theor...

This article presents the results of an inductive, interpretive case study. We have adopted a narrative approach to the analysis of organizational processes in order to explore how individuals in a financial institution dealt with relatively novel issues of corporate social responsibility (CSR). The narratives that we reconstruct, which we label 'idealism and altruism', 'economics and expedience' and 'ignorance and cynicism' illustrate how people in the specific organizational context of a bank ('Credit Line') sought to cope with an attempt (...) at narrative imposition. In particular, our work exemplifies how people in organizations draw on shared discursive resources in order to make sense of themselves and their organizations. We illustrate how many people within the bank found it hard to integrate the normative case for CSR with their version of a narrative identity which had, and continued to be, centred on economic imperatives for new initiatives. Our article demonstrates both the value of the analysis of shared narratives, and represents an attempt to deal adequately with the polyphony of organizational voices, in case studies of CSR. (shrink)

This paper explicates the influential Confucian view that “people” and not “institutional rules” are the proper sources of good governance and social order, as well as some notable Confucian objections to this position. It takes Xunzi 荀子, Hu Hong 胡宏, and Zhu Xi 朱熹 as the primary representatives of the “virtue-centered” position, which holds that people’s good character and not institutional rules bear primary credit for successful governance. And it takes Huang Zongxi 黃宗羲 as a major advocate for the (...) “institutionalist” position, which holds that institutional rules have some power to effect success independently of improvements in character. Historians have often called attention to this debate but left the major arguments and positions relatively unspecified. As I show, the Confucian virtue-centered view is best captured in two theses: first, that reforming people is far more demanding than reforming institutional rules; second, that once the rules have reached a certain threshold of viability, further improvements in those rules are unlikely to be effective on their own. Once we specify the theses in this way, we can catalogue the different respects and degrees to which the more virtue-centered political thinkers endorse virtue-centrism in governance. Zhu Xi, for example, turns out to endorse a stronger version of virtue-centrism than Hu Hong. I also use this account of the major theses to show that Huang Zongxi, who is sometimes regarded as historical Confucianism’s foremost institutionalist, has more complicated and mixed views about the power of institutional reform than scholars usually assume. (shrink)

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly embedded in tasks ranging from trivial queries to high-stakes decision-making. This raises pressing questions about how to attribute epistemic credit and moral responsibility to users that interact with AI for solving epistemic tasks. I argue that the cognitive status we ascribe to AI—whether as tool, extension, collaborator, or agent—cannot be fixed in the abstract but is instead shaped by contextual moral stakes. Drawing on frameworks of extended and distributed cognition, as well as debates (...) about testimony and pragmatic encroachment, I explore a contextualist solution: in low-stakes settings, users may justifiably treat AI as if it possessed epistemic agency, but in high-stakes domains such as medicine, AI should be regarded strictly as a tool, with moral responsibility remaining exclusively human. I suggest, education offers an intermediate case, where AI may function as a cognitive extension or collaborator so long as students and teachers retain responsibility for the relevant outcomes of the learning process. I conclude that while AI can produce epistemic goods on par with human agents, its lack of moral accountability should motivate users to avoid taking outputs at face value in relevantly moral contexts. Users should therefore modulate their epistemic stance toward AI according to context, preserving human responsibility in morally charged interactions while allowing more agent-like treatment in cases where moral constraints don’t play a role. (shrink)

BackgroundThis study investigates the awareness and application of the internationally recognized Vancouver guidelines on co-authorship among doctoral students in medicine across North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW), Germany, the federal state with the highest number of medical faculties (nine) nationwide. Although authorship practices have been widely discussed in medical research, empirical data on doctoral students’ awareness of and adherence to these guidelines remain limited, particularly in Germany.MethodsWe carried out a cross-sectional online survey among 147 former doctoral students who completed their dissertations at a (...) medical faculty during the last two years. Participants were recruited via mailing lists, social media, and doctoral graduation ceremonies between December 2024 and June 2025. Descriptive statistics were used to summarize the data. To examine further relationships, correlational analyses were conducted using chi-square tests.ResultsWhile 84% (n = 123/147) of the participants considered the Vancouver authorship guidelines important, 61% (n = 90/147) reported that at least one criterion of the Vancouver guidelines had not been fulfilled in their work. Furthermore, 56% (n = 82/147) reported never having received any information about the guidelines. Among doctoral students supervised by male supervisors (n = 103), female doctoral students had lower odds of receiving information about authorship guidelines (Odds Ratio [OR] = 0.37, 95% CI 0.17—0.83) and of reporting a clear policy regarding them (OR = 0.37, 95% CI 0.16—0.81) compared with male doctoral students.ConclusionOverall, our findings indicate that, among the surveyed cohort of former medical doctoral students in Germany, self-reported adherence to authorship guidelines was limited and observed gender-related differences. Variations in the perceived dissemination and implementation of ethical authorship practices were associated with the supervisory gender constellation. These results underscore the need for more robust institutional frameworks, systematic education on authorship ethics, and clearer accountability mechanisms in the supervision of doctoral research. (shrink)

In the academic world, a researcher's number of publications can carry huge professional and financial rewards. This truth has led to many unethical authorship assignments throughout the world of publishing, including within faculty-student collaborations. Although the American Psychological Association passed a revised code of ethics in 1992 with special rules pertaining to such collaborative efforts, it is widely acknowledged that unethical assignments of authorship credit continue to occur regularly. This study found that of the 604 APA-member respondents, 165 felt (...) they had been involved in an unethical or unfair authorship assignment. Furthermore, nontenured faculty members and women were statistically more likely to be involved in an unethical or unfair assignment of authorship credit than tenured faculty members or men. (shrink)

I concur with Merker and colleague's critiques, suggesting that hypotheses about the evolutionary function of consciousness can help address them. Brains are parallel systems that function to compute possible actions and predict outcomes. I hypothesize that a core function of consciousness per se is the global feedback of information about those actions actually executed, supporting local learning via neuronal updating.

This paper evaluates the economic assumptions of economic theory via an examination of the capitalist transformation of creditor–debtor relations in the 18th century. This transformation enabled masses of people to obtain credit without moral opprobrium or social subordination. Classical 18th century economics had the ethical concepts to appreciate these facts. Ironically, contemporary economic theory cannot. I trace this fault to its abstract representations of freedom, efficiency, and markets. The virtues of capitalism lie in the concrete social relations and social (...) meanings through which capital and commodities are exchanged. Contrary to laissez faire capitalism, the conditions for sustaining these concrete capitalist formations require limits on freedom of contract and the scope of private property rights. (shrink)

Though freedom of associationfreedom of association got its name after Adam SmithSmith, Adam’s (1723–1790) time he should be thought of as an important source of the ideas involved in it. Three considerations support this: (1) he was early in identifying its legal structure and corresponding jurisprudence; (2a) he provided compelling ethical and (2b) political grounds for it; (3) his argument is interesting because, while his conclusions are comfortably liberal, the justification of them is inextricable from his rejection of a contractarian (...) tradition and rationalist methodology that remains influential among liberals today. (shrink)

Business leaders are challenged to balance the profit‐maximizing demands of capitalism with the ethical expectations of society. Commonly, profit is the more powerful force. As a result, society is awash with ethical lapses; corporate misconduct is on full display. This paper presents a pedagogical approach designed to sensitize students to that challenge, and to demand serious self‐reflection. The ethical dilemma presented in this paper highlights the aggregate shift of the cost of Credit Card Reward Programs from higher educated, richer, (...) nondiverse populations to lower educated, poorer, minority populations—a business practice which is legal but ethically questionable. To reinforce student learning, a teaching note is included that explores the dilemma. The paper also examines the intransigence of unethical behavior and methods for teaching business ethics. (shrink)

When generative AI technologies generate novel texts, images, or music in response to prompts from users of these technologies, are the resulting outputs meaningful in all the ways that human‐created texts, images, or music can be meaningful? Moreover, who exactly should be considered as the author of these AI outputs? Are texts created by generative AI perhaps best considered as authorless texts? In my paper, I will relate the above‐mentioned questions to the topic of who (if anyone) can take (...) class='Hi'>credit for, or potentially be blameworthy for, outputs created with the help of large language models and other generative AI technologies. I will argue that there is an important asymmetry with respect to how easily people can be praiseworthy or blameworthy for outputs they create with the help of generative AI technologies: in general, it is much harder to be praiseworthy for impressive outputs of generative AI than it is to be blameworthy for harmful outputs that we may produce with generative AI. This has implications for the issues of meaning and authorship. Generative AI technologies are in important ways “gappy”: they create gaps with respect to meaning and authorship, as well as with respect to responsibility for their outputs. (shrink)

The value problem of knowledge is one of the prominent problems that philosophical accounts of knowledge are expected to solve. According to the creditsolution, a well-known solution to this problem, knowledge is more valuable than mere true belief because the former is creditable to a subject’s cognitive competence. But what is “credit value”? How does it connect to the already existing distinctions between values? The purpose of the present paper is to answer these questions. Its most important conclusion is (...) that credit value is not—contrary to what the upholders of the credit solution have frequently claimed—final value. (shrink)

The rapid development of credit default swap market has changed the manner of credit risk management of banks to some extent and has had a new influence on the bank-enterprise credit model. In this study, the credit financing process of credit risk in small- and medium-sized enterprises gathers within a bank, which makes it difficult for SMEs to raise funds. On the basis of the perspective of CDS, we construct an incentive game model of bank-enterprise (...) credit behavior and analyze the influence mechanism of the credit financing of SMEs on CDS contract coupon rate, CDS payout ratio, bank-enterprise credit effort, and loan recovery rate when considering CDS. The result shows that the CDS contract leads to insufficient supervision after a bank loan, the moral hazard of the SMEs rises, and the probability of credit default events increases. In addition, in view of CDS, the SMEs can access more credit funds. (shrink)

Auteure en 2001 d’un ouvrage remarqué sur les couturières dans la France d’Ancien Régime (Fabricating Women. The Seamstresses of Old Regime France, 1675-1791), Clare Haru Crowston interroge dans cette nouvelle étude l’omniprésence du crédit dans la société française des xviie et xviiie siècles. Concept polysémique, envisagé ici dans sa dimension à la fois économique (délai de paiement) et culturelle (forme de pouvoir et d’influence conférée par la réputation), le crédit constitue une catégori...

Formal recognition of research contributions is critical for career advancement and the allocation of research funding. However, some contributions are mentioned only in the acknowledgments section, which are not indexed by scholarly databases, resulting in little recognition for those involved. We contextualize this shortfall in terms of contributorship, the movement to recognize specific research contributions rather than rely solely on authorship. Broadening the range of recognized individuals is currently advanced largely through reducing authorship restrictions and unbundling manuscripts into smaller elements, (...) such as datasets and protocols, that receive their own attributions. Here we focus on a complementary path, enhancing the contents and metadata of acknowledgments sections. Capitalizing on existing infrastructure and standards, we propose: 1) when acknowledging individuals, authors include ORCIDs (subject to the acknowledgees’ approval) and provide CRediT information where applicable; 2) publishers solicit identities of acknowledgees in a similar way to how they do so for authors in their submission portals; and 3) publishers include metadata of acknowledgees in JATS-XML files. Implementing these steps should encourage scholarly databases to index non-author contributors. The ensuing increase in visibility for research contributors, such as technicians and library professionals, should result in greater recognition of non-author roles. (shrink)

A significant portion of the world’s text is tagged by readers on social bookmarking websites. Credit attribution is an inherent problem in these corpora because most pages have multiple tags, but the tags do not always apply with equal specificity across the whole document. Solving the credit attribution problem requires associating each word in a document with the most appropriate tags and vice versa. This paper introduces Labeled LDA, a topic model that constrains Latent Dirichlet Allocation by defining (...) a one-to-one correspondence between LDA’s latent topics and user tags. This allows Labeled LDA to directly learn word-tag correspondences. We demonstrate Labeled LDA’s improved expressiveness over traditional LDA with visualizations of a corpus of tagged web pages from del.icio.us. Labeled LDA outperforms SVMs by more than 3 to 1 when extracting tag-specific document snippets. As a multi-label text classifier, our model is competitive with a discriminative baseline on a variety of datasets. (shrink)

This study investigates the relation between equity and credit market development and Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) across 61 countries during the period from 2002 to 2022. Using a fixed effects identification strategy based on the seminal work of Rajan and Zingales (1998), we find that industries more dependent on external finance exhibit significantly better (worse) CSR performance in countries with more developed equity (credit) markets. These results suggest that while equity market development can be a catalyst for promoting (...) CSR and ultimately improving environmental and social outcomes in countries around the world, the development of credit markets can discourage CSR investments, especially in industries that are heavily dependent on external finance. Further analysis reveals that ethical and social considerations, in addition to purely financial ones, moderate the relation between financial market development and CSR. Our study provides insights into how financial market structures and institutions can be aligned with global sustainability goals and responsible corporate behavior. (shrink)

Digitalising public programmes creates new accountability challenges, many of which are under-theorised. Using Universal Credit to illustrate its points, this article argues that the distributed infrastructures upon which digital government programmes rely create extended chains of decision-making actors. Each link along the chain is responsible for decision-making components, such as data entry and interpretation. This phenomenon has three significant effects. First, it distributes administrative responsibilities widely. Second, it ‘publicises’ actors previously considered ‘private’, by integrating companies and landlords into public (...) decision-making processes. Third, it bureaucratically disempowers, because it makes it difficult for all actors to recognise and address errors. In some cases, it prevents them from knowing they are involved in decision-making processes at all. Drawing on public administration, socio-legal studies and public law scholarship, we reconceptualise ‘administrative burden’, ‘bureaucratic disentitlement’ and ‘privatisation’ to show how this distribution of responsibilities within novel ‘decision chains’ raises critical questions for public law. (shrink)

It is unclear whether or not grant winning should count towards authorship credit in the sciences. In this paper, I argue that under certain circumstances grant winning can count for credit as an author on subsequent works. It is a mistake to think that grant winning is always irrelevant to the correct attribution of authorship.

The fusion of gift giving and market exchange elements in economic transactions creates practical difficulties. How can the parties involved agree about the meaning of their engagement and the value of the exchanged objects? This article tackles the topic—an important one in economic sociology—by looking at moral transactions (i.e., transactions that combine pecuniary and ethical considerations). Through an empirical study of the issuance of Irish and Israeli diaspora bonds during the 1920s and 1950s, respectively, I identify practices that help actors (...) overcome the difficulties inherent in moral transactions. Clarification practices allow actors to treat the exchange as either gift giving or market exchange. Blurring practices allow actors to complete a transaction without agreeing on its meaning. Blurring practices require creating a zone of indeterminacy, that is, a context in which the parties can cooperate without agreeing on their relationships. The broader implications of these practices are then discussed. (shrink)

We derive and estimate a production function for microfinance institutions to provide empirical evidence of the ethical dilemma of balancing social and financial logics in hybrid organizations. A worldwide panel dataset of microfinance institutions is utilized and a production function augmented by average loan size is estimated using the control function approach. We show how this framework can be used to quantify the tradeoff between social outreach and financial sustainability in relation to the expansion of microfinance institutions’ credit operations. (...) The study reveals that expanding the extensive margin (increasing the number of loan clients) requires on average more than twice as many inputs as expanding the intensive margin (increasing the average loan size) to achieve the same growth in assets. Beyond the case of microfinance our production function illustrates that as hybrid organizations expand, they will inevitably face an ethical dilemma as the laws of economic efficiency exert pressure on their social missions. (shrink)

In recent years, supply chain finance is exploited to solve the financing difficulties of small- and medium-sized enterprises. SME credit risk assessment is a critical part in the SCF system. The diffusion of SME credit risk may cause serious consequences, leading the whole supply chain finance system unstable and insecure. Compared with traditional credit risk assessment models, the supply chain relationship, credit condition of SME, and core enterprises should all be considered to rate SME credit (...) risk in SCF. Traditional methods mix all indicators from different index systems. They cannot give a quantitative result on how these index systems work. Furthermore, traditional credit risk assessment models are heavily dependent on the number of annotated SME data. However, it is implausible to accumulate enough credit risky SMEs in advance. In this paper, we propose an adaptive heterogenous multiview graph learning method to tackle the small sample size problem for SMEs’ credit risk forecasting. Three graphs are constructed by using indicators from supply chain operation, SME financial indicator, and nonfinancial indicator individually. All the graphs are integrated in an adaptive manner, providing a quantitative explanation on how the three parts cooperate. The experimental analysis shows that the proposed method has good performance for determining whether SME is risky or nonrisky in SCF. From the perspective of SCF, SME financing ability is still the main factor to determine the credit risk of SME. (shrink)

Calvin’s view on the legitimacy of interest has had a great impact on the economic development of Western society. Although Calvin took a fundamentally positive attitude to interest, he also proposed several restrictions on the charging of interest. In this article, we investigate the relevance of these restrictions to the current credit crisis. We find that each of them provides a relevant interpretation of what went wrong in the buildup of the credit crisis and gives directions to improve (...) policies of banks and governments as well. (shrink)

Since ancient times the practices and ethics of bankers and banking in general have undergone a great deal of criticism. While lending is motivated by profit, and while households are not explicitly coerced into borrowing money, the justice of a system which exploits workers and at the same time encourages them to borrow money in order to maintain a certain standard of living can be viewed as sometimes unfair and perhaps immoral. The value of goods, according to St. Thomas Aquinas (...) and Karl Marx, should mostly reflect the value of labor embodied in them, and for that reason, labor should be compensated fully for its work. For these reasons, Aquinas and Marxian economists offer somewhat similar and at the same time different views on both the labor theory of value as well as on the morality of certain banking practices. If credit and the banking system also bring about crisis and the greater concentration and centralization of capital, then the morality of these outcomes also needs to be examined. (shrink)

The literature has greatly explored the inclusionInclusion of women in managerial positions and how this affects the effectiveness of organizations, but the conclusions are still debatable. In this sense, this chapter investigates the impact of women's participation in corporate governance roles (members of the Board of Directors, members of the TMT, and as CEOs), while considering the importance of credit unions to Brazil’s economy and society. We identified a low presence of women on the executive board, fiscal council, and (...) board of directors of credit unions based on a sample of 607 Brazilian credit unions. For the empirical analysis, we employed logistic regression estimation to investigate the impact of women's representation in management structures on the expansion of cooperatives' revenue. According to our findings, the revenue growth of credit unions with women in corporate governance roles (members of the Board of Directors, Fiscal Council, and Executive Board) is negative. Our study is particularly timely and adds to the previous literature on the effects of female leadership on the growth of credit unions. The regulatory reforms taking place in developing economies, notably Brazil, which call for the inclusionInclusion of more women in business affairs, increase the significance of our findings. (shrink)

This paper aims to explore whether the usage of credit cards has peer effects in rural areas of China. The results suggest that the usage of credit cards will be affected by the behavior of other farmers; namely, the usage of credit cards has peer effects in rural areas. We also verify that women, older, and low-academic farmers show stronger peer effects. The results emphasize that, compared with the mass farmers and vulnerable farmers, the usage of elite (...) farmers is more likely to affect the same behaviors of other farmers. Our study contributes to prior literature by giving empirical insights into the consequences of peer effects on the credit card usage of farmers, which conduces to a better understanding of the financial decision-making of farmers. The research may provide a practical implication for the optimal design of policy interventions. On the one hand, banks and other financial institutions can promote innovative financial products in rural areas with the help of peer effects; on the other hand, regulators can regulate farmers’ wrong financial behaviors by the social multiplier of peer effects to reduce systemic risks in rural finance. (shrink)

This research explores challenges women entrepreneurs face in accessing credit and analyzes their strategies through case studies. Despite these challenges, women-led businesses are increasing, showing resilience and dynamism. Studies reveal gender disparities in credit access, with women encountering more difficulties obtaining loans than men (Perrin & Weill, Finance Research Letters 47, 2022). A detailed analysis of three entrepreneurs in Rome evaluates their credit experiences in Made in Italy sectors, specifically handmade ice cream, shoes, and souvenirs (Paoloni, Elementi (...) di governo d’azienda. Giappichelli, Torino, 2020). Using a qualitative research method, this study examines case studies to analyze real-life events (Yin, Qualitative research methods 5:359–386, 2003), offering a nuanced understanding of social and cultural influences on credit access.This research deepens understanding of current dynamics in credit access, highlighting communication gaps with financial providers and broader social and cultural influences.Findings suggest unified approaches by financial institutions and policymakers to promote financial inclusion through collaborative programs with governmental and non-governmental entities (Onoshakpor et al., Contextualising African Studies: Challenges and the Way Forward. Emerald Publishing Limited, 2023). Theoretical contributions identify conceptual gaps influenced by context and geography, enriching theoretical frameworks. Future research should explore evolving financing access through digital services and technological tools (Roy & Patro, Vision 26:282, 2022). (shrink)

In the future, large language models (LLMs) may enhance the delivery of healthcare, but there are risks of misuse. These methods may be trained to allocate resources via unjust criteria involving multimodal data - financial transactions, internet activity, social behaviors, and healthcare information. This study shows that LLMs may be biased in favor of collective/systemic benefit over the protection of individual rights and could facilitate AI-driven social credit systems.

This work approaches the phenomenon of guild socialism from a new perspective, focusing on the Douglas Social Credit movement. It explores the key ideas, gives an overview of the main theories and traces their subsequent history. Thoroughly researched, it provides original material relevant to the field of political economy. This early approach to non-equilibrium economics reveals the extent of the incompatibility between capitalist growth economics and social and environmental sustainability.

This article documents the response of cooperative institutions that were required to adhere to new capital adequacy regulations traditionally geared for profit-maximising organisations. Using data from the Australian credit union industry, we demonstrate that the cooperative philosophy and internal corporate governance structure of cooperatives will lead management to increase capital adequacy ratios through the application of accounting window dressing techniques. This is opposite to the intended purpose of template regulation aimed at efficiently increasing operating margins and lowering risk. Our (...) results raise several debatable issues regarding the ethics of accounting management and the imposition of one-shoe-fits-all external regulation. (shrink)

There is no doubt that a negative perception of financial risk and a lack of credit risk management adversely impact business growth and business owners’ wellbeing. Past studies suggest that most Nigerian traders have poor risk perceptions and manage risk poorly. A business coaching program within rational-emotive behavior therapy framework was evaluated in order to determine its effects on financial risk perception and credit risk management among Nigerian traders. This study used an open-label parallel randomized control design. This (...) 8-weeks coaching program had 60 traders in the REBT-based business coaching group and 59 traders in the control group. The mixed-model repeated measures ANOVA was utilized for analysis of the study data. Results show that relative to a control group, traders’ financial risk perception [F = 637.29, p < 0.001, ω2 = 0.69] and credit risk management [F = 795.51, p < 0.001, ω2 = 0.80] significantly improved after participating in REBT-based business coaching program. This study shows that REBT-based business coaching program is integral to increasing financial risk perception and credit risk management among Nigerian traders. This study contributes to the advancement of business coaching program within the rational-emotive behavior therapy framework for market traders, and its application in similar situations. The study considered the benefits of business coaching program for market traders from a developing country, which is a rarely studied group. It is highly recommended that professionals study the relationship between REBT-based business coaching and economic decision-making within various organizational contexts. (shrink)