Issue #1 (Volume 16 2019)

The current study aims at extending prior accounting research on the association between Corporate Social Responsibility Disclosure (CSRD) and Corporate Financial Performance (CFP) using a sample of listed firms on Kuwait Stock Exchange (KSE) from 2011 to 2012. It conducts a regression analysis to investigate the association between CSRD and CFP, as well as investigates the impact of firm size, leverage, and industry affiliation as the key determinants suggested by prior research on the level of CSRD. The results of the present study reveal that both CFP and firm size have significant positive associations with CSRD, whereas, in contrast, firm’s leverage and firm’s industry affiliation show non-significant associations with CSRD.

This empirical study aims mainly to investigate the effect of both dividend payments (DP) and five firm's attributes (firm size, firm leverage, firm performance, legal form and audit quality) on earnings quality (EQ) of the most active listed firms in Egypt. A sample of 552 firm-year observations during four years from 2014 to 2017 was used. Hierarchical Multiple Regression (HMR) was used to regress the six independent variables on firms’ EQ through the absence of firms’ earnings management (EM), which was estimated through discretionary accruals (DAC). Main results show that there is some divergence in EM practices over the four years and might suggest that EM by listed firms in Egypt exists especially in the first two years (2014 and 2015); how¬ever, relatively lower EM practices are found in the last two years (2016 and 2017). Correlation results show a number of significant relationships between the EM and three independent variables (firm leverage, legal form and audit quality). HMR results are in line with the results obtained via Pearson correlation.

At a time, the Nigeria Stock Exchange (NSE) is generally undergoing bearish trends; the paper investigated the performance of eighty-eight (88) sampled stocks, which were screened with the modern Price Earnings Growth (PEG) ratio into the Growth and the Value Portfolios. This is to ascertain whether the Value Portfolio outperformed the Growth Portfolio in terms of returns. From the researches in the developed and emerging stock markets, the momentum supports that the Value Portfolio outscored the Growth Portfolio in terms of returns. The paper explored pooled data from the Factbooks of the Nigerian Stock Market and the Annual Reports across different industries from 1990 to 2016. Descriptive methods and Arellano and Generalized Methods of Moment (GMM) xtabond2 were adopted to address the outliers, reverse causality and other related consequences of panel data. Similar to the findings from the developed and emerging stock markets, the study recognized that the Value Portfolio over-performed the Growth Portfolio in terms of returns in the NSE. Therefore, it is recommended that rational investors should show more preferences to invest in low-priced Value Stocks to earn higher returns than the high-priced Growth Stocks, which generated lower returns in the NSE.

In developing markets, new regulations are imposed to protect investors, to assure fairness and to enhance trust through controlling all types of market abuse. In addition, these regulations are imposed to enhance the overall market performance and efficiency. Market liquidity is one of the main pillars used to measure market overall performance. In this paper, the authors attempt to analyze market liquidity before and after the passage of the Capital Market Authority Law of 2010 (CMA), aimed at enhancing investors’ confidence and reinforcing better disclosure quality and accountability for Kuwait public companies. By introducing six liquidity measures that captures market depth, turnover, and volatility, the authors documented highly significant deterioration in all the measures following the CMA Law with more profound effect on smaller firms. The researchers concluded that overstated regulations in developing markets, in spite of its goal of improving market overall performance, structure, enhancing investors’ protection, and market integrity, can have an adverse effect on market efficiency.

This paper examines the market value added (MVA) of listed companies in Thailand. It is known that the major drawbacks of MVA are size and market return effects. Using the two additional approaches to improve MVA study – MVA change, and the market return adjusted of three-year growth rate of MVA – the better interpretations of MVA in the Thai market during 1999–2018 are obtained. The first approach reduces the market capitalization bias, while the second diminishes the effect of the overall market trend and the stability of firm’s current performance. This study finds that when the two alternative techniques are applied, the annual results of the MVA rankings are not consistent with those of the traditional MVA and thus lead to a new insight into such indicator. Therefore, this study advances the understanding of the market value added and value creation indicators.

The aim of this study is to evaluate the compliance level of corporate governance rules and examine the impact of this compliance on risk taking of corporations in Jordan. This study used panel data of the listed corporations in Amman Stock Exchange from 2013 to 2017. Corporate governance index was constructed to gauge the compliance level of corporate governance rules. The results show a good level of overall compliance of corporate governance rules. As for the compliance of the categories of corporate governance rules, rules of transparency and disclosure are ranked first, while rules of general meeting assembly are ranked fourth. The regression results report a negative influence of corporate governance and corporate risk taking. In addition, four governance variables concerning the features of the board of directors are used in the study. The results reveal a negative impact of the size of the board of directors, independence of the board, and committees of the board on corporate risk taking. It is expected that the outcomes of the study can be used by management of the corporations in addition to the Jordanian Securities Commission that seek to enhance confidence in the Jordanian capital market.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate whether a change in stock price synchronicity after IFRS adoption differs by industry characteristics. IFRS adoption was expected to improve earnings quality and comparability. Industry concentration and homogeneity are utilized as industry characteristics, which are known as determinants to earnings quality and comparability to examine IFRS adoption effect on the synchronicity.
Using Korean firms listed from 2006 to 2015, the author found that stock price synchronicity decreases after IFRS adoption. The reduction in synchronicity is larger for firms in a concentrated industry. However, the researcher didn’t find that incremental effect of homogeneity on synchronicity changes around IFRS adoption. These results remain unchanged after several robustness tests. The results imply that earnings quality after IFRS adoption improves, while comparability effect is not evident in the Korean market.
The paper has implications that co-movement of stock price decreases after IFRS adoption in that delivering firm-specific information to investors; in addition, the magnitude of impacts of IFRS adoption differs by the industry characteristics. The author extends prior studies about IFRS adoption effect on the capital market by providing that the effects need to be examined after considering the industry characteristics.

The study investigates the impacts of firms-, industry-, and country-level covariates on the financing structure amongst the Indonesian listed companies. Using artificial nested testing procedure, the preferred models were selected that could illustrate the association between debt ratio and its determinants. By making use of the full sample, it was found that these three levels of determinants explain approximately 73% of leverage variations.
Further, the importance of these determinants on leverages across sectors is also investigated in this study. The sectoral behavior plays a crucial role as the firm- and sector-level covariates indicate more important variables than country-level covariates, which implies that the firm-level covariates become the main factors in firm financing structure determination.
The artificial nested testing procedure (F-test) was used choose the preferred models, which is suitable for each sector. The selection of models depends on the sectoral characteristics, which indirectly control the orientation and magnitude of relationships. Those three levels of determinants have different impacts on capital structure across sectors, which provides evidence that the sectoral behaviors indirectly tend to influence the association between determinants and firm financing pattern in the Indonesian context.

This study came to inspect the impact of the development of both financial market and banking system on the economic growth of Jordan based on the annual data covering the period 1993–2017. Through the use of many methodologies: Johansen cointegration test, (VECM), and Granger causality test, where real GDP was used as an indicator of economic growth, the real market value of stocks (Market Capitalization) (LCAP) and Share Turnover (LTURN) are indicators for the financial market, Money supply in the broad concept (LM2), and Local domestic credit (LCR) are indicators for the banking sector.
The results of this study reported that the study variables are stationary, and in the level of order 2, they are integrated, and a long-run relationship between the study variables existed according to the Johansen co-integration test. VECM model result and the target model result confirm a short-run causality running from the all variables toward GDP. Granger causality test underline a single directional causality running from variables of our study to GDP and denote the short-run impact between LCAP, LTURN, LM2, LCR, and LGDP. The analysis of the variance decomposition shows that the development of the banking system affects economic growth almost equally with the impact of the development of the financial market. The results go to the same line of supply-leading hypothesis.

Most of the GCC countries currencies are pegged to the US dollar, which make the economy those countries susceptible to the US monetary policy change. This paper used the non-structural VAR tests to examine the spillovers impact of the two recently developed US monetary policy uncertainty indices (the BBD MPU and the HRS MPU) shocks on GCC stock markets from 2003: M01 to 2017: M07. The result revealed that during the period under review, the two MPU have slight significant impact on some GCC markets. But the HRS MPU has more impact than the BBD MPU. Besides this, unidirectional causality running from HRS MPU to Bahraini and Kuwaiti Stock market was detected within the period. Hence, policymakers should realize the heterogeneity impacts from US MPU to stock markets in GCC countries. The findings also help investors and portfolio managers to better understand the effects of US monetary policy uncertainty on the stock markets.

The purpose of the research is to find the right strategic formula to resolve bad loans suitable to environment and characteristics of micro-financial institutions and their consumers. It applies qualitative approach by means of interactive method put forward by Milles and Huberman (2009) as analysis method. Data are obtained from indepth interview with superordinates, staff and consumers of microfinance institutions in Kendari city. A microcredit institution “Harum” needs several strategis to handle bad loans. It includes: institutional reinforcement (improvement in service procedure, increase in human resources’ skill, more branch offices, more new recuitments, the involvement of sub-district government, the use of information system), reinforcement of consumers’ capacity (tight selection process, counseling of business management, advisory service, and special relationship). The research results serve as solutions to microfinancial institutions in handling bad loans, from which development and sustainability can be assured. Consumers might make use of this information to develop their business. They also might serve as references for regional government in making the right policy for the development of micofinancial institutions and small business empowerment. This is the first study exploring formulation of strategy for microfinancial institutions in handling bad loans. The research explores internal and external aspects of microfinancial institution, with holistic view of the right policy in terms of institutions and consumers.

The argument holds that visionary and dynamic small and medium enterprises (SMEs) tend to position growth at the centre of strategy. However, there has been a growing body of literature that has examined how financial literacy can support owner-managers
of SMEs in making solid financial decisions that will enhance the growth of their businesses. In the present study, financial literacy and financial resource availability were modelled as different antecedents of SMEs growth. Nevertheless, the boundary condition for such models has received very little attention in the context of Ghana. Accordingly, in regard to resource-based view (RBV) logic, the current research examined the implications of contingency variable financial literacy (proficiency) on the relationship between financial resource availability and SMEs growth, particularly in the context of Ghana. The findings of the current research revealed that high financial literacy led to more positive effect of financial resource availability on SMEs growth.

Pakistan’s capital market and economy have significant features for examining the dynamics of the dividend policy. The agency conflicts between the management and the investors of the firms are main barriers to the success of the firm. The shareholder is generally taking away all the rights and similarly has a control on the decision concerning the dividend policy. The dividends are conveying better information than any other source regarding the firm’s prospects. The aim of this research is to identify and analyze the influence of shareholder preference and dividend signaling on the dividend policy of the corporations in Pakistan. The respective study presents the analysis of top financial management beliefs by taking eighty listed corporations on Pakistani stock exchanges during 2017–2018. Pearson correlation and multiple regressions are applied on responses to explore whether there is an influence regarding the shareholder preferences and the signaling mechanism on the dividend policy of the listed firms in Pakistan. Through statistical techniques the findings proved that shareholder preferences and dividend signaling have a positive and significant relationship with the dividend policy of listed corporations. Dividend policy is the response of investor preferences and signaling aspect of dividends.

This study provides an empirical analysis back-testing the implementation of a dispersion trading strategy to verify its profitability. Dispersion trading is an arbitrage-like technique based on the exploitation of the overpricing of index options, especially index puts, relative to individual stock options. The reasons behind this phenomenon have been traced in literature to the correlation risk premium hypothesis (i.e., the hedge of correlations drifts during market crises) and the market inefficiency hypothesis. This study is aimed at evaluating whether dispersion trading can be implemented with success, with a focus on the Standard & Poor’s 100 options. The risk adjusted return of the strategy used in this empirical analysis has beaten a buy-and-hold alternative on the S&P 100 index, providing a significant over-performance and a low correlation with the stock market. The findings, therefore, provide an evidence of inefficiency in the US options market and the presence of a form of “free lunch” available to traders focusing on options mispricing.

The size of the public sector is an important tool in public governance. Public sector size may fuel both economic growth and political influence over the economy.
By compiling and processing data from different sources of public accounts the paper aims at mapping the development of key financial indicators for the Norwegian central government sector during the transition period from the mid 19th to the mid 20th century. The data enable us to give measures of the size of the public sector alone and compared to the overall economy.
It is found that the sector started its continuous growth before politicians deliberately started to increase the sector’s size of the total economy. The paper also finds that an increase of the public sector often, but not always, reflects political economy regimes. Persistent growth in public finances as a tool for economic policy making did not take place before the introduction of the social-democratic regime in 1935.
The paper also concludes that economic growth started before the growth in the public sector, suggesting that public sector growth might as well be a result of economic growth or vice versa.

This study analyzed capital market investors’ recognition of the predictability of fair value-based valuation. It was examined if market investors overvalue the predictive value of fair value by comparing that value with that measured in accounting performance. The results reveal that investors are likely to overvalue fair value more than predictive values reflected in accounting performance. In particular, the results show that investors can gain abnormal returns through the market anomaly due to the functional fixation that investors cannot distinguish between unrealized profits and realized ones. Though there are considerable studies about accrual anomaly, few studies explore it with the separation of unrealized profits from total accruals. A number of studies about the causes of accrual anomaly have been conducted from various perspectives. The analysis of this study argues that the unrealized profits derived from fair value evaluation can be a cause of accrual anomaly. On the basis of the result, this study suggests that information about unrealized earnings should be reported separately.

The study used the Markov regime switching model to investigate the presence of regimes in the volatility dynamics of the returns of JSE All-Share Index (ALSI). Volatility regimes are as a result of sudden changes in the underlying economy generating the market returns. In all, twelve candidate models were fitted to the data. Estimates from the regime switching model were compared to the industry standard non-switching GARCH (1,1) using the Deviance Information Criteria (DIC). The results show that the two-regime switching EGARCH model with skewed Student t innovations describes better the return of the JSE Index. Additionally, we backtest the model results in order to confirm our findings that the two-regime switching EGARCH is the best of the models for the sample period.

This research study examines the characteristics of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) volatility of stock indexes. The following models are used in this research: Generalized Autoregressive Conditional Heteroscedasticity (GARCH), Exponential Generalized Autoregressive Conditional Heteroscedasticity (EGARCH), Fractionally Integrated Generalized Autoregressive Conditional Heteroscedasticity (FIGARCH), Glosten Jaganathan Runkle Generalized Autoregressive Conditional Heteroscedasticity (GJR-GARCH), and Multifractal Model of Asset Return (MMAR). The research also used the data from the ASEAN country members’ (the Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, and Thailand) stock indexes for the period from January 2002 until 31 January 2016 to determine the suitable model.
Meanwhile, the results of the MMAR parameter showed that the returns of the countries have a characteristic called long-term memory. The authors found that the scaling exponents are associated with the characteristics of the specific markets including the ASEAN member countries and can be used to differentiate markets in their stage of development.

Finally, the simulated data are compared with the original data by scaling function where most of the stock markets of the selected ASEAN countries have long-term memory with the scaling behavior of information asymmetry. Some of the countries such as the Philippines and Indonesia have their own alternative models using GARCH and EGARCH due to the possibility of leverage. Generally, MMAR is the best model for use in ASEAN market, because this model considered Hurst exponent as a parameter of long-term memory that indicates persistent behavior.

Recent (2018) evidence identifies the increased need for active managers to facilitate the exploitation of investment opportunities found in inefficient markets. Typically, active portfolios are subject to tracking error (TE) constraints. The risk-return relationship of such constrained portfolios is described by an ellipse in mean-variance space, known as the constant TE frontier. Although previous work assessed the performance of active portfolio strategies on the efficient frontier, this article uses several performance indicators to evaluate the outperformance of six active portfolio strategies over the benchmark – subject to various TE constraints – on the constant TE frontier.

Family-controlled firms are a unique form of business because of the special nature of its ownership structure, management style, and financing needs. Moreover, these firms face difficulty in achieving a balanced mix of available financing alternatives (i.e., debt and equity), and this mix has a direct impact on the firms’ profitability, risk, and value. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to review the literature on how family involvement in business via ownership, management, and control affects capital structure decisions. The review showed that in a comparison with nonfamily businesses, family-controlled firms on average have higher debt levels. Additionally, family ownership is positively associated with debt financing, and the participation of family members in a firm’s top management leads to an increase in the firm’s overall debt level. Insights generated from the current study highlight the critical influence of family involvement in business on key financial policies such as capital structure decisions.

Auditing has a very important role in the economic life and the auditor’s report is considered as the end of accounting information system in the enterprise, where it gives full and thorough summary of information content. So, this study aims to identify the existence level and form of financial market reaction on the auditor report by defining the change impact of the external auditor’s opinion on the stock prices of service companies listed in Amman Stock Exchange (ASE) in the period 2010–2017. The study population consists of all the 37 service companies listed in ASE, in which the audit report type has changed from unqualified to qualified and vice versa, where the number of observations was 48 – 32 from unqualified to qualified and 16 from qualified to unqualified. The results showed that there is statistically significant difference of stock prices after changing the report type from unqualified to qualified, where its prices declined as a result of this change, while there weren’t any statistical differences of stock prices as a result of changing the report type from qualified to unqualified. So, companies must pay more attention to the auditor report issued on its behalf, and work at its best to keep this report unqualified.

The research is taken to integrate the effects of variable selection approaches, as well as sampling techniques, to the performance of a model to predict the financial distress for companies whose stocks are traded on securities exchanges of Vietnam. A firm is financially distressed when its stocks are delisted as requirement from Vietnam Stock Exchange because of making a loss in 3 consecutive years or having accumulated a loss greater than the company’s equity. There are 12 models, constructed differently in feature selection methods, sampling techniques, and classifiers. The feature selection methods are factor analysis and F-score selection, while 3 sets of data samples are chosen by choice-based method with different percentages of financially distressed firms. In terms of classifying technique, logistic regression together with SVM are used in these models. Data are collected from listed firms in Vietnam from 2009 to 2017 for 1, 2 and 3 years before the announcement of their delisting requirement. The experiment’s results highlight the outperformance of the SVM model with F-score selection method in a data sample containing the highest percentage of non-financially distressed firms.

Inverse cubic law has been an established Econophysics law. However, it has been only carried out on the distribution tails of the log returns of different asset classes (stocks, commodities, etc.). Financial Reynolds number, an Econophysics proxy for bourse volatility has been tested here with Hill estimator to find similar outcome. The Tail exponent or α ≈ 3, is found to be well outside the Levy regime (0 < α < 2). This confirms that asymptotic decay pattern for the cumulative distribution in fat tails following inverse cubic law. Hence, volatility like stock returns also follow inverse cubic law, thus stay way outside the Levy regime. This piece of work finds the volatility proxy (econophysical) to be following asymptotic decay with tail exponent or α ≈ 3, or, in simple terms, ‘inverse cubic law’. Risk (volatility proxy) and return (log returns) being two inseparable components of quantitative finance have been found to follow the similar law as well. Hence, inverse cubic law truly becomes universal in quantitative finance.

The industry of private equity and leveraged buyout has been, since its beginnings, subject to several chapters of bubbles and busts, the majority of whom are initiated under similar circumstances (excess of liquidity, junk debt and mimetic behavior).
The Islamic finance is a financial system that complies with the rules of the Sharia Law, and which naturally allows the achievements of purposes of Sharia, such as protection of property and capital, fair wealth distribution, reduction of uncertainty and speculation, to name a few.
From this perspective, this paper discusses the capacity of Islamic finance to help prevent some factors that trigger financial crises in the leveraged buyout market and to accomplish the intended purposes through this asset class.
In the first part of this paper, the authors try to break down some of these common factors that trigger or catalyze the economic booms of the leverage buyout industry, and propose a framework to visualize their effects through an agent-based Simulation program. The second part of the paper describes how Islamic economic principles constitute brakes to some distortions and excesses in the market, in such a way that the probability of occurrence of a boom decreases drastically. Finally, these Islamic features are added up to the simulation to provide a comprehensive benchmark.

The Ukrainian PFTS stock index volatility reaction as a whole and its constituent economic sectors (“Basic Materials”, “Financials”, “Industrials”, “Oil & Gas”, “Telecommunications”, “Utilities”) to seven non-monetary US information signals (“Consumer price index”, “Personal spending”, “Unemployment rate”, “Gross domestic product”, “Industrial production”, “Consumer confidence”, “Housing starts”) was carried out for the period 2000–2017 on the basis of closing stock quotations in the trading day format. To assess the “surprise” component direct influence nature of the USA selected non-monetary information signals on the PFTS stock index, an AR-GARCH econometric modelling device was used. The results achieved clearly indicate the presence of some PFTS stock index economic sectors heterogeneous reaction to the United States individual non-monetary information signals announcement. For example, such economic sectors as “Basic Materials”, “Financials”, and “Oil & Gas” volatility response to the US non-monetary information signal “Consumer price index” “surprise” components the opposite of the overall PFTS stock index reaction. It can also be concluded that the United States non-monetary information signals influence on the Ukrainian stock market volatility depends not only on the financial cycle phase and data frequency, but also on the PFTS stock index economic sector.

This paper examines reactions in the Ukrainian stock market to force majeure events, which are divided into four groups: economic force majeure, social force majeure, terrorist acts, natural and technological disasters. More specifically, using daily data for the main Ukrainian stock market index (namely PFTS) over the period from January 1, to December 31, 2018 this study investigates whether or not force majeure events create (temporary) inefficiencies and there exist profitable trading strategies based on exploiting them. For this purpose, cumulative abnormal returns and trading simulation approaches are used in addition to Student’s t-tests. The results suggest that the Ukrainian stock market absorbs new information rather fast. Negative returns in most cases are observed only on the day of the event. The only exception is technological disasters, the market needing up to ten days to react fully in this case. Despite the presence of a detectable pattern in price behavior after force majeure events (namely, a price decrease on the day of the event) no profitable trading strategies based on it are found as their outcomes do not differ from those generated by random trading.

In India, households predominantly prefer to invest their surplus in financial securities, which provide stable return irrespective of whether they beat inflation or help in creating wealth. However, financial planners advise their clients to invest their surplus for long term in risky assets such as mutual funds to generate inflation beating returns. But when households ask for the meaning of long term in a definite number, it varies among the financial advisors. Hence, the study made an attempt to answer this question by calculating the minimum time duration required to generate a minimum positive return for two indices (NIFTY 50, S&P BSE SENSEX) and 6 mutual fund schemes for a period of 23 years and the same two indices (NIFTY 50, S&P BSE SENSEX) and 20 mutual fund schemes for a period of 12 years and found out that the time horizon or the long term to ensure minimum positive return ranges from 5 years to 9 years depending up on the type of fund or the level of risk associated with the mutual fund schemes.

The article analyzes the model of financial imbalances in the regions, which allows assessing the effects of implementing various options of the financial regional policy aimed at reducing the depth of the crisis in regional systems, smoothing cyclical fluctuations, leveling the levels of socioeconomic development of the territories.
The financial imbalances of regions of Ukraine are estimated on the basis such as indicators of gross regional product, gross regional product per capita, index of physical volume of gross regional product in comparative prices (in the prices of the previous year), economically active population by regions, population incomes, and level of capital investments by region. In the process of assessing the financial imbalances of the regions, a constant study of the structure of the fluctuations of the values of these indicators, was conducted determining the significance of each size in the overall structure and identifying the features of the system development in different ranges.
Based on the assessment of financial imbalances in the development of regions, the causes and consequences of significant imbalances in the economic system were identified, and directions for increasing the efficiency of regional policy were proposed. In turn, the assessment of financial imbalances in the regions makes it possible to consider the influence of factors on the development of regions, because in some cases, the regional socioeconomic system perceives positively, in others – negatively. Therefore, it must have elements that contribute to the transformation of its parameters in the conditions of changing environment and, at the same time, ensuring the maintenance of regional stability.