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The purpose of this paper is to examine the impact of board busyness on firm efficiency in the context of directors’ experience, specifically on directors’ experience that moderates the impact of board busyness on firm efficiency. Directors’ experience is examined by exploring both depth (board tenure) and breadth (number of former listed directorship) of experience.

This paper employs data envelopment analysis (DEA) to examine firm efficiency. Then, fixed effect panel regression analysis is applied to test the direct and moderating effect based on a sample of firms in the selected Asia-Pacific countries.

Significant positive evidence for the moderating effect of directors’ experience on the impact of board busyness on firm efficiency is documented.

Findings are essential for managers, country policymakers and potential investors as inputs to improve the current company practices, laws and policies through the notion that directors’ experience does enable the busy board to contribute to improved firm efficiency.

This paper contributes to the debated perspectives on board busyness by providing initial evidence that directors’ experience positively moderates the impact of board busyness on firm efficiency.

This paper aims to evaluate the impact of international diversification, through the investment abroad activities of the Malaysian multinational corporations (MNCs), on their financial performance.

The paper applies the panel generalized method of moments (GMM) estimation technique that gives better results.

The empirical findings show that the move to invest abroad has brought a positive impact on Malaysian MNCs’ financial performance. However, in terms of a firm’s risk, the results contradict the general internationalization-risk hypothesis.

The study focuses on the top 100 multinational firms; future researchers may extend the time period and use the entire sample of all the multinational firms.

Foreign investments offer rewarding returns due to cheaper labour and raw materials, competitive edge in terms of technological advancement and larger market opportunities.

The paper contributes to the literature using the panel GMM’s estimation that effectively control for reverse causality and serial correlation problem. The paper also contributes to the international diversification and performance relationship, in a fast-growing Malaysia.

The purpose of this paper is to enhance the understanding of the long-debated impact of board busyness within a new framework of firm efficiency in the selected developed and developing Asia–Pacific countries, by assessing the moderation of directors' education towards the relationship between board busyness and firm efficiency. The extant literature on board busyness demonstrates to a lack of clarification of the relationship between board busyness and firm efficiency.

The sample for this paper comprises a panel data of 800 firms in a cross-country context of the selected developed and developing Asia–Pacific countries during the recent period of 2009–2015. This paper performs a non-parametric Data Envelopment Analysis to measure firm efficiency and panel regression analysis to examine the moderation of directors' education.

This paper provides support for the busyness hypothesis by documenting that the busy boards are likely to reduce firm efficiency. Moreover, this paper renders support to the upper-echelons theory by demonstrating that the impact of board busyness on firm efficiency is likely to turn positive in the presence of directors' education.

This paper highlights practical implication for managers especially in the Asia–Pacific region who seek to enhance firm efficiency, which is essential for firms in attaining the primary goal of profit maximization.

This paper builds on the extant literature by providing a contemporary research path regarding the moderation of directors' education to explain the long-debated impact of board busyness within a new framework of firm efficiency, based on a recent and significant sample of Asia–Pacific countries.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the impact of banking concentration on firm leverage in 21 major emerging countries from different geographical regions, controlling for firm determinant and macroeconomic determinant of firm leverage.

This study is based on a relatively large sample of 5,779 enterprises with total 48,280 numbers of observations over the period from 2006 to 2013 and the regression model is performed by applying two-step system general method of moment estimator methodology.

This study finds a positive and significant relationship between banking concentration and firm leverage. Therefore, the overall results follow the information-based theory which indicates lower firms financing obstacles as banks are more concentrated.

Bank-level data of all the countries to measure banking concentration is until 2013, which restrict the empirical analysis until 2013. Also, the study conducts the analysis.

The study enables policymakers, society, and academics to have better understanding on the beneficial effects of alternative banking market structure on firms’ access to credit and therefore, in determining the level of firm leverage in emerging countries.

The study represents one of the limited available empirical researches to examine the beneficial effect of alternative banking market structures of firm leverage in emerging countries.

Dynamic predictions of financial distress of the firms have received less attention in finance literature rather than static prediction, specifically in Malaysia. This study, therefore, investigates dynamic symptoms of the financial distress event a few years before it happened to the firms by using neural network method. Cox Proportional Hazard regression models are used to estimate the survival probabilities of Malaysian PN17 and GN3 listed firms. Forecast accuracy is evaluated using receiver operating characteristics curve. From the findings, it shown that the independent directors’ ownership has negative association with the financial distress likelihood. In addition, this study modeled a mix of corporate financial distress predictors for Malaysian firms. The combination of financial and non-financial ratios which pressure-sensitive institutional ownership, independent director ownership, and Earnings Before Interest and Taxes to Total Asset shown a negative relationship with financial distress likelihood specifically one year before the firms being listed in PN 17 and GN 3 status. However, Retained Earnings to Total Asset, Interest Coverage, and Market Value of Debt have positive relationship with firm financial distress likelihood. These research findings also contribute to the policy implications to the Securities Commission and specifically to Bursa Malaysia. Furthermore, one of the initial goals in introducing the PN17 and GN3 status is to alleviate the information asymmetry between distressed firms, the regulators, and investors. Therefore, the regulator would be able to monitor effectively distressed firms, and investors can protect from imprudent investment.

The purpose of this paper is to examine how corporate governance moderates the relationship between macroeconomic uncertainty and corporate capital structure.

This paper employs the two-step system generalized method of moments regression, considering a sample of 907 listed non-financial firms from seven Asia Pacific countries during the period 2004-2014.

This study finds that macroeconomic uncertainty has a significant negative impact on the capital structure decisions of firms. The results also reveal that the overall effect of macroeconomic uncertainty on capital structure among firms with better governance quality is significantly negative. The evidence suggests that corporate governance acts as an effective mechanism to curb the usage of leverage during times of high volatility. Further analysis shows that board independence, the separation between the roles of CEO and chairman of the board and blockholders’ ownership are effective governance mechanisms, whereas similar observations do not hold for board size and institutional ownership.

The findings of this study may be useful to policy makers to formulate appropriate policies to mitigate the adverse effects caused by macroeconomic uncertainty. This is important because macroeconomic uncertainty may have potential destabilizing effects on a country’s or region’s development by jeopardizing the firms’ ability to formulate sound investment, production and financing decisions. Additionally, the results suggest that good governance quality can act as a check and balance to ensure that firms use less leverage when they are facing volatility in the macroeconomic environment. These findings could help to reinforce the importance of good governance among policy makers of a country as well as managers of firms.

The authors make the first attempt to examine the moderating effect of corporate governance on the relationship between macroeconomic uncertainty and corporate capital structure.

This study empirically investigates the relationship between goodwill assets and capital structure (i.e. debt ratio) of firms and the moderating effect of financial market development on the relationship between goodwill assets and capital structure.

This research applied a quantitative method. The article collects large samples of listed firms from 23 developing and nine developed countries and applied the panel data techniques. This research used firm-level data from the DataStream database for both developed and developing countries. The study uses 4,912 firm-level data from 23 developing countries and 4,303 firm-level data from nine developed countries.

The findings reveal a significant positive relationship between goodwill assets and capital structure in developing countries, but goodwill assets have a significant negative relationship with capital structure in developed countries. Moreover, financial market development positively moderates the relationship between goodwill assets and the capital structure of firms in developing countries. The results inform firm managers that goodwill assets serve as additional collateral to secure debt financing. Moreover, policymakers should formulate a debt market policy that recognizes goodwill assets as additional collateral for the purpose of obtaining debt capital.

The study has several implications. First, goodwill assets are identified as a factor of capital structure in this study. Fixed assets have been identified as one of the drivers of capital structure in previous research, although goodwill assets are seldom included. Second, this article shows that along with demand-side determinants, supply-side determinants also play an important role in terms of the firms' choice about the capital structure. Therefore, firms should take both the demand-side and supply-side factors into consideration when sourcing for external financing (i.e. debt capital).

The study considered goodwill as a component of capital structure. The study analysis includes a large sample of enterprises, including 4,912 big firms from 23 developing countries and 4,303 large firms from nine industrialized or developed countries, which adds to the current capital structure information. Furthermore, a large sample size increases the results' robustness and generalizability.

The purpose of this paper is to disentangle the driving force of pyramidal firms' capital structure from nine East Asian economies.

To disentangle the driving force, this paper develops a new theoretical framework for the pyramidal firms'. Using panel regression, the new theoretical framework is tested on a set of 1,433 pyramidal firms covering a period from 1992 to 1997.

The regression results reveal that the separation of cash flow rights and control rights in the pyramidal firms have led to high usage of leverage for the purpose of preserving the ultimate owners' (UO) dominance in the pyramidal firms that he or she controls. Based on the findings, the study concludes that the actual driving force of the pyramidal firms' capital structure is the UO non‐dilution entrenchment motive.

The main contribution of this paper is the new theoretical framework developed which enable us to disentangle the driving force behind pyramid firm's capital structure.

This paper aims to test the significance of unobservable firm-specific effects on a capital structure model.

The paper employs the restricted least squares method to test the significance of unobservable firm-specific effects in a fixed effects model that includes unobservable effects against a pooled ordinary least squares model that excludes unobservable effects.

The empirical findings indicate that models that include unobservable firm-specific effects are correctly specified.

The limitation of this study comes from lack of data to measure unobservable effects such as managerial ability or managerial skills. Future research can develop index measures of managerial ability or managerial skills and borrow from management theory to explain the connection between managerial ability or managerial skills and firms' capital structure.

The findings imply that a capital structure model that excludes firm-specific effects could be mis-specified because such a model does not control for unobservable firm-specific factors such as managerial ability or managerial skills which have significant effects on firms' capital structure decisions.

The findings are important because the paper applies the restricted least squares method to test the significance of unobservable firm-specific effects. This technique has not been applied previously. The paper contributes to capital structure research in the fast growing South Africa.

This chapter investigates the effect of financial performance and corporate governance on market performance, using evidence from the companies listed on the IDX30 Index of the Indonesia Stock Exchange (IDX) from 2015 to 2018. The authors use six main independent variables and one dependent variable, controlled by using control variables in the regression analysis. Ordinary least square (OLS) regression methods are used to model the relationship between the dependent variable and the independent variables. The results show that the current ratio (CR) and Board Size (BS) have a significant negative effect on stock return (SR). In contrast, the quick ratio (QR) and debt to equity ratio (DER) have a significant positive impact on SR. Both the debt to asset ratio (DAR) and Independent Board of Commissioners (BOC) have an insignificant effect on SR. This evidence suggests that the CR, QR, DER, and BS are essential factors affecting SR.