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The effects of population growth in the developing world and climate change have increased the stress on available water resources. The majority of Rajshahi city, Bangladesh, is facilitated with groundwater withdrawal. As Bangladesh is a country of monsoon climate, reserved rainwater can be contributed as an alternative to extracted groundwater. This study aims to develop a framework for rooftop rainwater harvesting (RRWH) for domestic purposes and estimate the appropriate size of the storage tanks and their costs required to fulfill the annual drinking and cooking water demands through RRWH in Rajshahi city of Bangladesh.

A total of 100 single-story residential dwellings with varying rooftop areas were surveyed for the projection of RRWH potential. The relationship between the size and cost of a water tank and the rooftop areas of different houses is expressed using a general mathematical equation. Cost estimates for the proposed RRWH system for all houses have been completed, and a cost model illustrating the relationship between rooftop or catchment area and associated cost of RRWH system has been developed.

This study reveals that a maximum of 110.75 m³/year rainwater can be collected from a 100 m² rooftop area of Rajshahi city. Moreover, this study finds that such harvesting of rainwater can reduce municipal water supply to the extent of almost 75%. Water samples collected from rooftops also revealed that if germs were removed through bacteria treatment, the collected rainwater potentially can be used for drinking and cooking purposes.

The novelty of this study is that it focused mainly on how significant RRWH can be to meet people’s daily required amount of water for household purpose and ascertain the cost reduction using the RWH method. This paper also is unique as it assessed the volume of the storage tank that is sufficient to distribute the necessary amount of water for drinking and cooking purpose as a sustainable alternative source in the dry season.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the impact of corporate governance on auditor quality choice by IPO companies in an emerging market setting. It seeks to identify whether efficiency or opportunism is the driving force behind the choice of auditors in Bangladeshi firms going public. We try to see whether ownership concentration in the hands of a owner‐CEO wins over foreign shareholders in the contest of ensuring financial reporting quality.

Multivariate analysis has been carried out on all IPOs made during 1990 to 2005 whose financial statements were available. Logistic regression tool has been used to identify client's corporate governance attributes affect their choice of auditors. In total, three corporate governance attributes – CEO‐Chair duality, retained ownership, and foreign equity participation – were used to test the impact of ownership structure on auditor choice.

Our findings from logistic regression suggest that CEO‐Chair duality and the degree of foreign equity participation are significant determinants of auditor choice while proportion of board ownership is not. In addition, issuer size and whether the issuer is a green field operation also influence auditor choice while the length of a firm's operating history does not seem to matter. The findings support agency theory prediction that (at least one category of) principals (foreign shareholders in this case), are likely to trade‐off higher monitoring costs (of hiring a higher quality auditor) with agency costs arising from asymmetric information, primarily borne by absentee owners.

The work is based on empirical data directly from company financial statements. It uses audited financial statements and makes objective analysis of auditor choice dynamics in a frontier market that demonstrated significant growth of IPO activity in recent years.

The purpose of this paper is to test the relative strengths of efficiency and opportunistic considerations in making client auditor choice decisions in an emerging audit services market. The authors examine whether the degrees of foreign and institutional shareholdings, audit complexity, industry orientation (i.e. whether the firm belongs to the banking sector), ownership concentration in the hands of domestic sponsor shareholders, state ownership, power concentration in the hands of a CEO who is also the chairperson of the board, and audit risk affect the demand for superior monitoring by Big‐4 auditors.

The authors carry out a multivariate analysis using binary logit regression technique. They test whether efficiency or opportunism rules auditor choice of firms in their sample. Efficiency‐based variables used in the authors' models include foreign shareholding by a multinational parent, institutional shareholding, audit complexity and whether the firm belongs to the banking sector. Opportunism‐based variables include ownership concentration in the hands of domestic sponsor shareholders other than government, government shareholding, power concentration in the hands of a CEO who holds the position of chair as well, and audit risk.

The authors find that opportunistic considerations outweigh efficiency considerations in shaping auditor choice decisions in their sample. Two out of four efficiency arguments (foreign shareholdings in the hands of a multinational parent and institutional shareholding) support efficiency as the main driver of auditor choice while one (client belonging to the banking sector) indicates otherwise. On the other hand, three out of four opportunism arguments (government shareholding, CEO‐chair duality and audit risk) document opportunistic considerations to be the main forces behind auditor choice. The influence of foreign shareholding becomes apparent only when the foreign shareholder is the controlling shareholder.

This paper is the first of its kind to address auditor choice in an emerging market context. No other paper looked at auditor choice using efficiency‐opportunism incentives. The paper contributes to our understanding of auditor choice dynamics in emerging markets. The finding that institutional shareholding is associated with choice of high quality auditors is encouraging. Individual small investors can use institutional investors as a shield to protect their investment through the higher quality auditing linked to the presence of institutional investors.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a comprehensive analysis of the audit services market in Bangladesh. It explores the trend in audit fees over a period of 14 years and shows that in real terms audit fees have actually been declining although in nominal terms it appears otherwise. The study aims to expand the domain of audit fee literature by determining audit concentration in the market and thereby showing how the market is not dominated by the so‐called Big Four firms. The paper also examines the degree of inside ownership as a possible determinant of audit fees.

The paper employs a multivariate analysis of estimating audit fees against mainly client‐specific attributes. It computes Helfindahl Index to measure audit concentration in the market.

Results from the multivariate analysis show that the degree of inside ownership inversely affects audit fees. Client size and their multinational affiliation have a significant positive effect on audit fees. Firms in the financial sector also tend to pay significantly higher audit fees in Bangladesh. The reported inverse relationship between the audit fee and proportion of inside‐ownership in the auditee firm indicates, per agency theory prediction, that firms with more diverse ownership in Bangladesh pay more in audit fees. However, contrary to the findings in prior empirical studies, audit fee was reported to be significantly negatively related to audit complexity. As the audit complexity measure is revised, the variable ceases to be a significant driver of audit fees. This could be attributable to a methodological flaw in the traditional method of measuring audit fees as the ratio of inventory and receivables to total assets or to increased efficiency achieved by auditors via scale economies while auditing companies owned essentially by the same group of people.

The main limitation of the paper is that the closing period of the data is 2003, although there is no evidence to believe that the general determinants of audit fees have changed in Bangladesh since 2003.

A decline in real audit fees is a matter of concern for the quality of audit services because it may impede audit firms to invest in talent and other forms of audit technology essential to delivering a high quality audit. It may also have wider implications on the quality of financial reporting in the country.

If the audit fees do not increase keeping pace with general power, the profession would struggle to recruit talented individuals to the auditing profession. This may have longer‐term social implications as it may drive away potential graduates with little or no parental resources to support them to develop an accounting career with substantial dependence on family funds.

The current study is the first to introduce ownership structure based perspective, in a multivariate format, to explain what drives audit fees in a developing country setting. It also is the first to compute audit concentration in a developing country context. This is the first paper to present audit fee trend in real terms, i.e. inflation adjusted, client size adjusted, and so on.

The main objective of this study is to investigate factors influencing the amount of external audit fees in Kuwait. Of particular interest is the examination of the potential effect of the client size, client complexity, client risk, and the size of the audit firm on external audit fees.

An audit fee model is used to examine the effect of audit client size, client complexity, client risk, and the size of the audit firm on the amount of audit fees for a sample of audit engagements performed in the Kuwaiti audit market.

The study's results indicate that the amount of external audit fees is significantly influenced by the audit client size, liquidity ratio, and profitability ratio. The results, however, do not provide evidence of a significant relation between audit fees and the number of audit locations, or the size of the audit firm.

This study is original since it is the first to empirically investigate factors influencing the pricing of audit services in Kuwait.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the impact of audit quality and ownership structure on the degrees of accuracy and bias in earnings forecasts issued in initial public offering (IPO) prospectuses in a frontier market, Bangladesh.

The paper uses both univariate and multivariate tests on the sample of 75 IPOs. The paper employs the tests to see the association between the degree of forecast bias and three corporate governance variables.

The results reveal that the magnitude of earnings forecast bias is significantly explained by issuer, auditor reputation, proportions of capital raised from domestic as well as foreign investors, and whether the IPO firm is a start-up venture. Underwriter prestige, length of the issuing firms' operating history, leverage, whether the firm went public during a stock market boom, and forecast horizon do not appear to be statistically significant in explaining the degree of forecast bias.

Although auditor reputation and the proportion of equity retained by pre-IPO owners have been investigated in several studies on IPO forecast accuracy and/or bias, no study has attributed them to corporate governance as a whole by combining auditor reputation, and ownership categories held by small private investors and foreign portfolio investors.

The study investigates the structure of audit fees in an emerging economy, Jordan.

The following regression model will be tested: ADFEES = f (SIZE, AUST, COMP, INDS, PROF, RISK, YEND, TLAG). The model is tested by running a cross‐sectional linear ordinary least squares (OLS) regression of the audit fees on corporate size, the status of the audit firm, the degree of corporate complexity, profitability, risk, corporate accounting year end and the lag between the audit report and the end of the accounting year.

The results of the analysis revealed that corporate size, status of the audit firm, industry type, degree of corporate complexity and risk are the main determinants of audit fees. However, variables such as corporate profitability, corporate accounting year‐end (YEND) and time lag between YEND and the audit report date appeared to be insignificant determinants of audit fees.

In order to generalize the outcome of the study, the same study needs to be conducted over a long period of time (five years). Other variables such as the market share of the audit firm and the economic conditions of the country need to be included in the regression model in future research.

The outcome of the study can be used by audit firms to determine audit fees. Companies' management can also use the results of the study to predict the amount of audit fees that they will pay.

The purpose of this paper is to test whether dominant shareholder(s) of a firm enhance performance in Bangladesh and thus examines the arbitrary moves by the regulatory bodies, in the name of promoting “good corporate governance”, to restrict ownership concentration.

Building on the established literature, a simultaneous equations approach is applied to model the relationship between ownership concentration and performance and is tested on a sample of 567 observations on firms listed on the Dhaka Stock Exchange over a seven‐year period. The two equations model consists of firm performance and ownership concentration as endogenous variables along with other governance variable.

The results suggest a significant positive co‐deterministic relationship between ownership concentration and firm performance indicating that ownership concentration and firm performance simultaneously impact each other. It suggests that the ownership restriction imposed by the Securities and Exchange Commission is unjustified and detrimental to firm performance/growth in emerging countries such as Bangladesh.

This new evidence from an emerging market enhances our understanding of corporate governance in Asian countries. The study has implications for stakeholders, regulators and policy makers to revisit their attempt to limit founder‐family ownership holdings. Instead, their aim should be to balance the home‐grown unique features, such as a Top‐1 dominant shareholder, with Western governance mechanisms.

The paper is the first to consider Top 1 shareholder's ownership as the measure of ownership concentration, which is an important feature of the corporate sector in emerging markets. In emerging markets, founder‐family ownership concentration acts as an alternative governance mechanism substituting for strong and effective legal backing and other market‐driven monitoring mechanisms.

This study examines the impact of profitability, firm size and leverage on corporate tax avoidance in Bangladesh, an emerging South Asian economy.

A balanced panel data of 62 firms from Dhaka and Chittagong stock exchanges in Bangladesh from 2009 to 2020 were used to run the regression. This study employed the fully modified ordinary least squares (FMOLS) and dynamic ordinary least squares (DOLS) to examine the hypotheses.

The findings show that large firms positively impact corporate tax avoidance. Similarly, profitability and leverage are positively associated with tax avoidance, and the results are significant. Furthermore, the study conducts robustness tests that confirm the findings.

The use of cash effective tax rate (ETR) to investigate firms’ tax avoidance practices poses some limitations, and the results should be interpreted cautiously.

The current study may help policymakers better enhance tax collection from business firms. The findings could serve as a valuable input for effectively monitoring tax collection from large profit-earning firms.

To the authors' best knowledge, this is the first historical attempt in Bangladesh to use panel data to examine the relationship between the firm’s level characteristics and corporate tax avoidance. Panel data often provides greater flexibility with large data, simplifying calculation and statistical analysis.

This paper aims to investigate the relationship between key audit matters (KAMs) and audit costs and whether board size and independence affect this relationship. Furthermore, this paper examines the moderating effect of corporate governance on the relationship between KAMs and audit costs.

The authors hypothesise that disclosing more KAMs in the audit report is positively associated with audit costs because of the greater effort. The agency theory suggests that firms with good governance will mitigate the agency conflict of interest and improve financial reporting quality. Thus, good governance might moderate the relationship between reported KAMs and audit costs. The authors use a quantitative approach. The authors are using a sample of the UK FTSE all-share non-financial firms from 2014 to 2018 for the UK Financial Times Stock Exchange all-share non-financial firms.

The authors provide evidence of a significant positive relationship between KAMs and audit costs. The relationship is relatively higher when considering the independent directors' percentage as a moderating factor. These results came consistent with the agency theory literature. However, the authors found no empirical evidence to support a moderating effect of board size on the relationship between KAMs and audit cost.

The finding benefits the regulatory setters to better understand the consequences of the new auditing standards. This paper has theoretical and practical implications for regulators, standard setters, professional bodies, shareholders and academics.

This paper contributes to the literature assessing the regulatory changes related to audit reform and adds to the debate on the impact on audit costs. This paper underlines governance factors as a moderating role in this relationship between KAMs and audit costs.