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This paper examines the impact of financial sector development on the stability of money demand within the Ghanaian context. This is crucial given the recent technological advancements in the financial sector. The International Monetary Fund’s (IMF) Financial Development Index is utilized to broaden the policy scope of the findings. This index is used because it captures the efficiency, access and depth of the financial institutions and markets of an economy. This paper applies the autoregressive distributed lag model to annual time series dataset. The findings indicate that financial development significantly reduces money demand in the long term, while income increases it. Additionally, both interest rates and exchange rates are found to decrease money demand. This paper further reveals a bidirectional Granger causality between financial development and money demand, indicating that they mutually influence each other. This bidirectional relationship suggests that policymakers should prioritize gradual and controlled financial sector growth, considering its potential impact on the effectiveness of monetary policy.

This paper estimates the causal effect of the Nitrogen Oxide Budget Program (NBP), a regional cap-and-trade regulation targeting ozone pollution, on infant mortality in the United States. Exploiting the program’s staggered adoption across states and its restriction to summer months, we use county-level data from 1996–2009 to identify variation in prenatal pollution exposure. Prenatal exposure to the NBP reduced infant mortality by approximately 4–5 percent, with larger effects in the earliest months of life. Instrumental-variables estimates confirm that reductions in ambient ozone are the primary mechanism.

Crowdfunding has become a viable alternative financing mechanism for entrepreneurial ventures, with the video game industry representing a field of application. Despite its growing relevance, scholarly work on video game crowdfunding, particularly on post-funding outcomes and genre-specific dynamics, remains limited. This study contributes to this gap by providing a descriptive ex-post genre analysis of 298 successfully funded Kickstarter video game campaigns launched between September 2009 and October 2023 that were subsequently released on the major distribution platform Steam. The results reveal a strong concentration in a small number of genres (Adventure, Indie, Action, RPG, Strategy, and Simulation), which together account for 92.28% of all campaigns. Beyond genre distribution, the study examines funding goals, pledged amounts, funding ratios, numbers of backers, campaign durations, development times, Steam ratings, review counts, team structures, and temporal patterns of campaign activity across genres. The findings suggest that some characteristics align with overall crowdfunding dynamics, whereas others show distinct genre-specific variations. Practical implications arise for both backers and entrepreneurs, underscoring the importance of considering not only general crowdfunding dynamics but also genre-specific factors when designing or evaluating campaigns. Nonetheless, the study acknowledges its methodological limitations and emphasizes the need for further research to validate these findings and develop a more nuanced understanding of genre effects in crowdfunding.

Majority of existing studies have a country-specific, cross-country, and regional focus, but none of these studies have examined the determinants of global financial inclusion using world average data. This study examines the determinants of global financial inclusion from 2005 to 2023 using world average data obtained from the world development indicators. The study used multiple regression estimation methods namely the fully modified ordinary least squares (FOLS) regression method, the generalized linear model (GLM) regression method, and the quantile regression method. The findings reveal that global indebtedness has an adverse effect on global financial inclusion while adult literacy rate is beneficial for global financial inclusion. Inflation, unemployment, and economic growth do not have a significant effect on global financial inclusion.

We study how social economy organisations mobilise relational capital to enable territorial innovation under proximity configurations. Using a comparative multiple-case design of six Portuguese organisations (interviews, documents, observation), we propose an operational lens that distinguishes social, organisational, and relational innovation and clarifies the boundary between relational capital (stock) and relational innovation (process). Governance levers - participatory routines, distributed leadership, and boundary-spanning - translate relational assets into outcomes. Proximity acts through configurations of organisational and cognitive closeness, moderated by institutional settings and selective extra-regional ties. These configurations lower coordination/search frictions and, via matching efficiency and knowledge spillovers, convert trust into implemented innovations. Digital coordination complements, rather than substitutes, these mechanisms once governance baselines are in place. The contribution is twofold: (i) an actionable stock–process distinction tied to governance mechanisms; and (ii) a configuration-based account of proximity that integrates digital and face-to-face coordination. Practical implications concern proportionate, learning-oriented evaluation and the design of boundary-spanning routines; policy implications support place-based regional development instruments that fund network orchestration and capability building.

Recent research has demonstrated that many mean-variance portfolio selection rules often fail to out-perform the naive (1/n) portfolio in out-of-sample testing. This paper advances this line of inquiry by applying the naive and Sharpe Portfolios to 10000 data sets drawn from the 2007-2021 time frame. Unlike prior studies, however, the focus herein is on mid- and small-cap equities listed in the S&P 400 and S&P 600 indices, respectively. Additionally, both cross-sectional and time-series cross validation techniques are used to assess the out-of-sample performance. Shortfall performance is also assessed. The results indicate that the naive portfolio delivers inferior performance in-sample and superior performance out-of-sample, consistent with prior studies. This suggests that the naive model’s out-of-sample advantage persists in current data, across two very different modes of cross validation, and in equities with small- and mid-level market capitalization levels.