Motivated by the agency theory and the need to examine the effect of separation of ownership and management, this study examines the determinants of profitability in different firm ownership structures and how different ownership structures impact profitability of listed firms between 2003 and 2013, using pooled annual data of 23 Ghanaian listed firms. Employing a number of static models (OLS, Random Effect and 3 Stage Least Squares), we find evidence that while profit determinants vary for listed firms given their ownership structures, ownership structures also affected profitability differently. Specifically, for listed firms, profitability was determined by capital intensity, liquidity, financial risk, age and GDP; for non-family owned listed firms, profitability was determined by capital intensity, liquidity, market share and age; for foreign owned firms, profitability was determined by capital intensity, liquidity, age and GDP; and for non-foreign ownership, profitability is determined by capital intensity, liquidity, financial risk, growth, age and GDP. When we examine the impact of ownership structure on profitability and find that family owned listed firms make 30% less profits compared to non-family owned ones, whilst foreign owned firms make 13% more profits than non-foreign owned ones. These findings confirm the agency theory which posits that separation of ownership and management, though may lead to agency problems, can positively affect profits. The study recommends that family owned listed firms should consider diluting ownership in order to grow more profits.

This study examined the effect of board diversity on the financial performance of deposit money banks in Nigeria. The study also examined the relationship between board independence and financial performance of deposit money banks in Nigeria. For the purpose of this study, the proxy for financial performance is profit margin while the proxies for board diversity and board independence are the ratio of female directors to total board size and ratio of non-executive directors to total board size, respectively. The data for the study were sourced from the annual reports of 10 listed deposit money banks in Nigeria from 2008 to 2017. The data were analyzed using pooled Ordinary Least Square regression. The results show that the coefficient of board diversity was positively signed and statistically significant at 5% (β=0.34, ρ=0.02); the coefficient of board independence was positively signed and statistically significant at 5% (β= 0.11, ρ=0.02). The study concludes that both gender diversity and board independence positively affect the financial performance of deposit money banks in Nigeria. Therefore, the study recommends that deposit money banks should encourage appointment of qualified female directors on the board. In addition, deposit money banks should ensure the independence of the board by appointing independent non-executive director who are well experienced in bank management.

The purpose of this study is to provide updated information and facts of the Malaysian audit market concentration and auditor workload. The global auditing services market is presently dominated by a group of four audit firms which known as Big 4; namely Deloitte, PriceWaterhouseCoopers, Ernst & Young and KPMG. The audit industry in Malaysia offers several exemptions, as observed that two of non-big 4 audit firms succeeded to make their place into the Malaysian top 4. The study examined the audit firms share based on the number of audits and included all Malaysian public listed companies from 2012 to 2016.The findings indicate that the Malaysian audit market falls into the category of loose oligopoly and dominated by 8 audit firms. It is noted that the market share of the Big 4 in Malaysia have been reduced over a five-year period 2012-2016, and these firms mainly focusing more on large or more established clients. The examination related to auditor workload suggests that there is a decreasing trend in the workload of individual audit partners; on average the Big 4 firms staffing ratio is lower as compared with non-big 4 which may indicate that Big 4 partners have less workload. The study is useful for policy makers and regulators to better analyze the audit market concentration and workload in Malaysia.

This paper presents a survey on the effect of corporate dividend payout policy on stock price volatility. The primary objective of this study is to examine the impact of dividend payout ratio on the stock price volatility in Pakistan Stock Exchange. A sample of 15 firms from PSX is considered and the study covers the historical data over the period 2011-2015. Stock Price volatility is the dependent variable in this study and dividend payout ratio is the main independent variable. For this purpose, some other independent variables are also included such as Earnings Volatility, Size of the firm, Leverage and Assets Growth. The study has determined a positive relationship between stock price volatility and dividend payout ratio. In addition, our results show that earnings volatility and leverage had negative relationship with stock price volatility. Other independent variables including assets growth and size have maintained positive relationship with stock price volatility.

This research includes an extensive review of the studies associated with Corporate Governance. The study uses Scopus database as a primary search engine to collect the necessary data and collects 333 records over the period 2010-2018.The purpose of this research is to investigate the structured study of research activities carried out around the subject of corporate governance which have been published in international, well-known and credible magazines, books and sites. For this purpose, the study searches the phrase corporate governance on Scopus site and detects around 7200 documents and 2000 of highly cited documents are selected for the purpose of the investigation accomplished by a bibliometrics tool. The study limits the survey on published articles over the period 1993-2009 and detects 806 documents among 2000 documents from Scopus. The results indicate that papers published by researchers in United States have received the highest citations (8669), followed by United Kingdom (2094) and Australia with 1557 citations.

Efficient and stable performance of the banking system underpins sustainable growth of any economy. Of late, several economic reforms have been initiated in India for facilitating growth and withstanding dynamics of global economy. In this context, the current study compares the performance of the selected private and public sector banks in India on a five year time horizon in order to discern any changes in the performance over a period of time. First, the performance of the selected banks are examined in terms of management efficiency perspective using a Multi-Criteria Decision Making (MCDM) technique such as Combinative Distance-based Assessment (CODAS) when an Entropy method is also employed for determining criteria weight. The study also applies k-Means Clustering for checking consistency of performance based ranking with asset management efficiency. Finally, the paper delves into the relationship between financial and market performance. The study has found consistent results and observed private sector banks perform better than the public sector.

This study examined the association between fair value accounting and reliability of accounting information. The study adopted survey research along with quantitative methods. Users of the accounting information represented by corporate investment analysts and corporate portfolio managers were the respondents for the purpose of this study. The population size was one hundred and sixty-one (161) users of accounting information decomposed into one hundred (100) corporate investment analysts and sixty-one (61) corporate portfolio managers. The primary source of data was employed with the structured questionnaire as an instrument used to collect the data. Data was collected through the administration of 161 copies of the questionnaire to both corporate investment analysts and corporate portfolio managers. One hypothesis was formulated and was tested using the Pearson product moment correlation technique at a significant level of 5% and 10% while the Statistical Package for Social Science (SPSS) was engaged to analyze the data. Findings revealed a significant association between fair value accounting and reliability of accounting information of the firms in Nigeria. Hence, the study recommended that adequate and regular training programs and conferences on fair value accounting application have to be organized. This is because most of the employees of the companies in Nigeria did not understand how to use fair value in an inactive market, appropriately. Thus, it is of great importance that they were trained to understand different valuations and estimation techniques of fair value; how and when to apply them in the measurement of assets and liabilities in the financial statement.

The purpose of this research is to investigate the relationship between stock market development, business cycle and risk of the banks. The statistical population of the study is all banks whose shares were accepted in Tehran Stock Exchange from 2010 to 2015. The study selects 10 banks, which were active throughout the entire research period on the stock market. The research data were extracted from the financial statements of the companies and analyzed using regression models based on panel data. The research findings show that there was a direct and significant relationship between stock market development and risk of banks. In addition, the effect of stock market development on risk of banks was different in the presence or absence of a crisis, and the financial crisis in banks reduced the impact of the financial development on the risk of banks. The results also show that during the periods of commercial boom, the effect of the financial market development on the risk of banks was more than the periods of the recession.

Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) is a well-known method used to measure the efficiency of decision making units. In this paper, we study the impact of the financial crisis while integrating DEA efficiency measures with Support Vector Machines (SVM). Moreover, to account for the heterogeneity effect in the efficiency measures, the gap statistical method of Tibshirani, et al., (2001) [Tibshirani, R., Walther, G., & Hastie, T. (2001). Estimating the number of clusters in a data set via the gap statistic. Journal of the Royal Statistical Society: Series B (Statistical Methodology), 63(2), 411-423.] is applied in order to achieve the optimal number of cluster. This study uses December quarterly panel data consisting of Farm Credit Agricultural Banks data from 2005 to 2016. We find strong evidence that the efficiency measures were stationary prior to the financial crisis (2005-2006), during the financial crisis (2007-2009) and post financial crisis (2010-2016). The results further show that the integrated DEA-SVM provide a lower performance during 2007-2009. Furthermore, the results show that the Agricultural banking sector was both efficient and stable over the period being analysed.

During the past three decades, data envelopment analysis (DEA) has been successfully used for measuring the relative efficiency of financial or non-financial firms. This paper presents an empirical investigation to measure the relative efficiency of five Canadian banks versus 6 US big banks using DEA method. The study considers the number of employees and total assets as input and net revenue is used as the output of the DEA model. The data are collected from the official statements of the banks for the fiscal year of 2017. The results indicate that 6 US banks maintained an average efficiency of 0.87 but the average efficiency of Canadian banks was 0.72. While two US banks maintained an efficiency of one, the other US banks demonstrate relatively well in terms of the performance. In Canada, while one bank performed relatively well, the performance of the other Canadian banks were not as good as the US banks.