Search results

This study examines the effect of business group affiliations on corporate cash holdings and how political connectedness modifies the relationship between business group affiliations and corporate cash holdings.

The multiple ordinary least square regression with year dummies is used to estimate the effect of business groups on cash holdings. For moderating, the multiplicative term is used. The data from 252 non-financial firms listed on Pakistan Stock Exchange were collected for the analysis from 2010 to 2018.

The findings show that business group affiliations negatively affect corporate cash holdings, and political connection positively moderates this relationship. Business group firms that are politically connected hold less cash. The firm-specific factors such as leverage, size, cash flow, and dividend dummy also significantly affect corporate cash holdings.

The results imply that affiliated companies have lessened financing frictions and improved stability in their expected future cash flows. Moreover, the results indicate that political connection minimizes the opportunity and agency costs linked to cash holdings.

This study contributes to the existing literature by examining the moderating role of political affiliations on the relationship between business groups and cash holdings in the emerging market.

This study aims to examine the effect of corporate derivatives use on firm value and how the corporate governance index modifies this relationship.

The sample consists of 219 nonfinancial firms on the Pakistan Stock Exchange (PSX) from 2011 to 2019. The study used ordinary least square regression with year and industry dummies for estimations. Multiple estimation models such as fixed/random effect, Fama–MacBeth and two-stage least squares (2SLS) are used for robustness. Finally, the PROCESS macro tool is used to estimate the effect of moderating the role of corporate governance (CG) as robustness.

The findings show that derivatives use has an inverse influence on firm value. The firms did not use derivatives as a risk management tool but for speculation motives. However, the corporate governance index significantly weakens this relationship. However, strong governance forces the managers to use derivatives for hedging purposes. The firm-specific factors, including size, age, leverage, cash, financial distress cost, dividend and growth opportunities, also significantly influence firm value. The findings are robust to the other estimation models.

The findings indicate that emerging economies like Pakistan are more prone to agency problems. The strong corporate governance structure helps firms turn the speculative motive of derivatives use into hedging purposes and mitigate the agency issues.

This empirical evidence suggests that good governance structures can help improve the impact of derivative usage on firm value.

To the best of the author's knowledge, this is the first study that examines the conditional role of corporate governance on the derivatives–value relationship from the viewpoint of agency problem/speculative motive.

Corporate governance (CG) is an ongoing interesting topic getting the attention of market participant, business regulators and researchers in today’s business environment. The purpose of this study is to analyze the moderating role of earnings management on CG-value and CG-risk relationship in the emerging economy of Pakistan.

A panel data analysis is used in this study. A panel data of 71 non-financial listed companies of Pakistan for the 2008-2017 period is considered for this study. Secondary data is collected from the annual reports of non-financial firms listed on PSX. Seven econometric equations are developed to test the research hypothesis.

The results reveal that CG significantly enhances the firm value and performance measures. Moreover, CG mitigates the practices of earning management and eliminates the risk that develops opportunistic behavior among managers to commit frauds.

The results of this study suggest that the board of directors (BODs) should intensify their governance role and ensure that the executives perform their duties to maximize the wealth of the shareholders and not engage in any misrepresentation of accounts that may lower the company position and decrease the firm value. Moreover, the managers should be informed about their accountability and acknowledged that at the end of the year, they would be audited by an expert’s auditors for their responsibilities. Concerning regulatory bodies, regulatory authorities should ensure that there must be at least one independent member on the board. The better-governed system reduces both agency conflicts and enhances firm value.

A number of studies have already been undertaken by multiple investigators to build connection among CG with firm performance, but there is not even a single study in the literature that considers CG, firm value, firm Risk and discretionary earning management as a whole in one model to generalize its results in the emerging economy of Pakistan. A fundamental element of current analyzation process addresses that this is the very first graft of study conducted in Pakistan having combination of four variables together in one revision. There is minimal work that focuses on moderating effects of earning management on the CG-value and CG-risk relationships. This study uses two standard measures of firm performance (i.e. ROA and Tobin’s Q), one proxy of earning management (DEM) and three attributes of CG (board size, audit quality and ownership structure). Previously, researchers have not investigated a model that combines variables (CG as independent and Firm performance and Firm Risk as dependent along with DEM as moderator) in a single study.