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This study aims to examine how woman corporate leadership indicators and environmental, social and governance (ESG) disclosure in listed banks on Ghana Stock Exchange are related.

Data was obtained from the audited annual reports of the banks for the period 2006–2020. Empirical result estimation was achieved using Panel Corrected Standard Errors.

The result revealed that female chief executive officer (CEO), female board chairperson and board gender diversity are associated with higher disclosure of ESG issues in listed banks in Ghana in overall terms. However, in terms of individual disclosures, female board chairperson positively impacts social disclosure, whereas both female CEO and female board chairperson affect governance disclosure positively.

In this era of business where there is much emphasis on green business and investment by various stakeholders for purposes of ensuring business legitimacy, the result implies that banks must consider females to occupy the positions of CEO and board chairperson since that can help to improve ESG performance of banks.

In this era of business where there is much emphasis on green business, socially responsible investment and impact investment by various stakeholders, the result implies that banks must consider improving the representation of women in leadership since that can help to improve ESG performance of banks and hence ability to attract more investors.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study to provide empirical evidence from a developing country perspective in Sub-Saharan Africa that gender of bank leadership has implications for ESG disclosure.

This study provides empirical evidence for the first time on how different measures of monetary policy affect banking profitability in Ghana.

Providing empirical evidence on how different measures of monetary policy affect banking profitability in Ghana using 29 banks for period between 2006 and 2016, new monetary indexes are developed and a robust panel random effect models is employed with year effect controls.

The results show that while increase in monetary policy basis point reduced banking profitability, average monetary policy rate stimulated banking profitability. Interestingly, the monetary policy basis point and rate indexes developed reduced and enhanced banking profitability, respectively. While these results may sound contradictory, they have both theoretical and empirical backing. Thus, basis point increments serve a monetary policy tightening condition which leads to higher loan prices, lower borrowing and declined profitability in the short run. However, in the long run, banks adjusted their loan prices and deposits to reflect basis point changes in their favor, hence the positive effect of average monetary policy rate on banking profitability. Additionally, monetary policy easing which represents decline in monetary policy basis point and rate enhances banking profitability.

These findings imply bank managers may take advantage of monetary policy easing to maximize profits in the banking sector of Ghana. Also, the monetary policy committee must be mindful of monetary policy tightening through basis point change since upward basis point increments reduce banking profitability.

This study provides empirical evidence for the first time on how different measures of monetary policy (developing indexes from monetary policy basis point and monetary policy rate) affect banking profitability in an emerging economy as Ghana.

This study aims to examine the nonlinear threshold effect of shadow economy on sustainable development in Africa while providing additional evidence on how this nonlinear threshold effect play out in economies with high and low developed financial/credit markets.

This study uses 37 African economies between 2009 and 2017 in a dynamic GMM panel model that controls for country, year and technological effects to ensure consistency and reliability of results and findings.

The results reveal that there is an inverted nonlinear U-shape nexus between the size of shadow economy and sustainable development in both short run and long run in Africa and across economies with high and low developed credit/financial market. Also, the threshold points beyond which the size of shadow economies dampens sustainable development is lower for economies with high financial/credit market development and higher in the long run.

These results have policy implications and recommendations and suggest that shadow economies can be beneficial to sustainable development particularly when the size of shadow economies are restrained from increasing beyond certain thresholds/levels. Moreso, to restrict the adverse effect of shadow economies on sustainable development, policymakers can rely on developing their financial/credit markets to tame the destructive nature of shadow economies on sustainable development. These results are robust to technological, year/time and country effects.

To the best of the author’s knowledge, this study examines for the first in the context of Africa, the nonlinear effect of shadow economies on sustainable development under low and high developed financial markets.