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The purpose of this study was to investigate how chief executive officer (CEO) characteristics, including age, education, nationality and particularly gender, influence firm performance in a developing Southeast Asian Country (Indonesia).

The study uses balanced firm-level panel data for 203 nonfinancial companies listed on the Indonesia Stock Exchange from 2010 to 2020. Return on assets, return on equity and Tobin’s Q were used to measure firm performance. The data were analyzed using panel data regression analysis, including a fixed effects model with clustered standard errors.

The results indicate that female CEOs, education and nationality enhance firm performance, while CEO age can either improve or reduce firm performance. Numerous robustness checks were performed; the results were consistent with those in the main analysis.

Individual characteristics should be considered when appointing CEOs. Some CEO characteristics enhance firm performance. Female CEOs bring new perspectives, while older CEOs’ longer experience adds a competitive advantage. More educated CEOs have a better ability to deal with challenging intellectual activities, and CEOs from foreign countries better understand international market regulations. However, some characteristics may reduce firm performance, for example, older CEOs are more conservative and unable to adapt to changing business environments.

This study contributes to corporate governance studies by synthesizing CEO characteristics and investigating their relationship with firm performance. Moreover, it emphasizes that developing countries such as Indonesia have different economic, legal, social and cultural environments than developed countries, especially Western countries.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the impact of chief executive officer (CEO) characteristics on the earnings management examined by the discretionary accruals.

The sample includes 151 French firms listed on the CAC ALL shares index from 2006 to 2015. The paper uses the feasible generalized least square regression technique to test the relationship between CEO characteristics and earnings management.

Using discretionary accruals as a proxy for earnings management, the results obtained from the three models (Jones modified 1995; Kothari et al., 2005; Raman and Shahrur, 2008) indicated that there is a positive and significant relationship between CEO duality, CEO nationality and the quality of financial communication. However, no significant relationship was found between CEO board member, CEO turnover and earnings management.

A literature review finds that fewer studies have investigated the relationship between earnings management practices and personal CEO characteristics in the French context. Furthermore, no study yet has examined the influence of CEO nationality and CEO age on earnings management practices. This study provides empirical data about the impact of CEO’s characteristics on earnings management and how these different characteristics can facilitate the transition to manipulate and influence the quality of financial communication.

This paper aims to examine the impact of chief executive officer (CEO) attributes on foreign shareholdings from the perspective of an emerging economy.

This study examined Bombay Stock Exchange listed firms from the Indian stock market and applied a balanced panel data approach with fixed effect estimation technique during the period 2010–2019.

The study shows that CEOs’ financial education and a higher level of education positively affect foreign shareholdings. The age and experience of CEO have a positive and significant impact on foreign shareholdings. Firms with male CEOs are preferred more by foreign investors. The effect of CEO busyness and CEO duality is negative on foreign shareholdings. Foreign investors prefer to invest in firms with foreign nationality CEOs. Furthermore, the robustness test reveals that the influence of CEO attributes on foreign shareholdings is stronger for new, small and stand-alone firms than for old, large and group-affiliated firms.

The study will be beneficial for a diverse audience ranging from firms’ board of directors, regulators and policymakers who are entrusted with the CEO recruitment process. Additionally, firms seeking external financing should disclose CEO information adequately and improve the reporting quality to attract foreign investors, as they consider CEO characteristics as a valuable signal before making investment decisions.

In light of the current legislative reforms, this study can be recognized as one of the early studies that explore the relationship between CEO attributes and foreign shareholdings in the context of an emerging economy.

This study aims to examine the prevalence of transfer pricing and earnings management activities, and how they are impacted by corporate governance mechanisms.

Using the political cost theory, the study provides insights into how opportunistic managerial behaviours which have a strong link to profit shifting and tax evasion are driven by corporate governance using data from 16 listed firms for the period 2008–2020.

The results reveal that the transaction-based transfer pricing model is better than the index-based model and the accrual-based earnings management model suits the political cost theory more than the real earnings management metric. Board size and female CEO increase transfer pricing aggressiveness but board independence, CEO tenure, CEO nationality and female Board Chairwomanship reduce transfer pricing aggressiveness. The findings also reveal the role of multinational enterprise status, private ownership, industry type, firm size, financial leverage, asset tangibility and firm age. For accrual-based earnings management, board independence, CEO tenure, and female Board Chairwomanship significantly decrease earnings management. Other factors include private ownership, firm size, and firm age.

The findings of the study are relevant for shaping industry-level policies on earning management, transfer pricing and related-party transactions. Since these opportunistic managerial behaviours are the foremost drivers of tax avoidance and profit shifting, the findings of this study provide relevant insights for practitioners, tax and other regulatory authorities, policymakers and the academic community alike.

This is among the premier studies on the transfer pricing and earnings management nexus with corporate governance factors using the political cost theory, especially in the developing country context. It also reveals the significant impact of gender and suggests the need for gender diversity in corporate management.

This paper aims to explore the relationship between the readability of sustainability reports and chief executive officer (CEO) attributes, comprising monetary, non-monetary incentives and personal characteristics.

The study is based on an international sample of companies operating in sustainability-sensitive industries during 2016–2018.

The results prove that CEO monetary incentives, as well as CEO non-monetary incentives, negatively influence the readability of sustainability reports, revealed in a positive relationship with readability indexes, by providing reports with greater reading difficulty. Additionally, this study shows evidence about the relation of complementarity between these incentives. Other CEO characteristics have no significant effect on the readability of sustainability reports.

This research sheds the light on the role of CEO incentives in obfuscating sustainability information to portray the company, operating in sustainability-sensitive industries, in a favorable image.

This study aims to examine the association between chief executive officers’ (CEOs) characteristics and sell-side analysts’ recommendations.

This study uses a sample of firms listed on the London Stock Exchange and uses two databases, Capital IQ and BoardEx to study the above relationship. A variety of regression analyses are used in the empirical models, including ordinary least squares, fixed effect, random effect, Tobit, Logit and generalized method of moments.

The authors find that firms with CEOs who had a wider network size and firms with foreign CEOs receive favorable investment recommendations. Further, firms with CEOs who have more time to retire are more likely to receive favorable investment recommendations. However, the authors find that firms with CEOs with more qualifications receive unfavorable recommendations and female CEOs are not affecting investment recommendations.

Ultimately, this study demonstrates the importance of CEO characteristics for sell-side analysts who play an important role in the stock markets.

Given that several publicly announced international merger and acquisition deals have been abandoned in recent years, the purpose of this paper is to present a synthesis of influential articles that examine organizational characteristics of cross-border acquisition transactions. The synthesis is framed through general traits and resources, learning and prior acquisition experience, and top-level management and governance attributes. Specifically, the paper conceptualizes key organizational attributes influencing the propensity of cross-border negotiations, and the most common characteristics and post-deal effects by illustrating several case examples from around the world.

Owing to fairness and integrity principles of the literature survey studies, the paper adopts an exploratory review design to present a synthesis of several influential articles published in strategy, international business and corporate finance journals. Since case method and storytelling are the best qualitative approaches to conceptualizing extant theoretical contributions, a number of case examples—successful, delayed and abandoned—from around the world have been discussed by leveraging the case information from archival sources.

Drawing on resource-based view, organizational learning, upper echelons and agency theory perspectives, the paper underscores three observations. First, organizational characteristics such as firm age, firm size, ownership structure, slack resources, marketing resources, technological intensity, export intensity and business group affiliation have different impacts on the propensity of publicly announced cross-border deals. Second, firm’s prior acquisition experience and firm’s acquisition experience in the target country have positive or moderating effects on the success of a cross-border merger. Third, top-level management characteristics such as CEO foreign nationality and CEO international career experience, and governance characteristics such as board size, the number of independent directors and directors with overseas experience, have mixed effects on the incidence of cross-border acquisitions.

The paper puts forth several recommendations for top-level managers participating in cross-border acquisition negotiations, such as learning from peers in the same industry, learning from predecessors in the target country and learning from failure negotiations in the same industry and other industries.

Nested within the organizational, international business strategy and corporate finance literature, the paper presents a synthesis of influential publications that study organizational characteristics affecting the propensity of cross-border acquisitions. The cases discussed in this paper are unique examples from around the world.

This study examines the role of corporate governance on corporate tax avoidance from the developing country perspective of Malaysia.

A sample of 318 firm-year observations from 2016 to 2020 from the 100 largest listed companies in Malaysia was analysed using a fixed effects panel least squares regression model.

CEOs play a significant role in corporate tax avoidance in Malaysia. Specifically, they are motivated by money and power to engage in risky tax avoidance activity. It was also found that corporate governance mechanisms related to the board of directors have a limited effect on companies’ tax compliance issues.

This study’s findings can help regulators and policymakers understand the circumstances leading to increased tax aggressiveness as well as the limitations of certain governance mechanisms in curbing tax avoidance activity within companies. The findings can also assist shareholders and investors in formulating internal policies to create better alignment of their interests with those of management. The unique emerging economy evidence and insights from this study advance knowledge and can inspire fellow researchers in their future studies.

This study differs from most prior studies by examining the governance and tax issue from a developing country perspective, that of Malaysia. Developments in the country’s corporate governance framework and tax landscape in recent years make it relevant and interesting to investigate the issue in this emerging economy. Offering unique empirical evidence and insights from an emerging economy viewpoint, and with findings that may be generalised to other emerging economies sharing similar market traits (particularly ASEAN nations), this study enriches and extends the existing literature.

The purpose of this study is to examine whether chief executive officer (CEOs) are paid for the systematic and/or unsystematic risks and whether there is any optimum risk premium level in the executive pay.

Firm and year fixed effect panel data regression was used to estimate the relationship between total CEO compensation and systematic (market) and unsystematic (firm) risks.

There is no nexus between CEO pay and unsystematic (diversifiable) risk; however, the association between CEO compensation and systematic (undiversifiable) risk is positively significant in line with agency theory. Moreover, it is revealed that this positive relationship has an optimum point (curvilinear).

This paper contributes to the controversial argument in the literature by investigating the situation in the Swiss market. Switzerland is an exemplary country because of its direct democracy (consensus) structure for executive pay. This study is limited by the fact that only total CEO compensation is analyzed.

As a practical implication, it is shown that after the optimal point, the higher compensation does not motivate the CEOs to take higher risks and does not provide the organizations with any additional benefit.

The finding of this study supports agency theory’s risk premium assumption and provides additional evidence to the contradictory results in the literature with a new country setting that has paramount importance in executive compensation phenomena. It is a comparative finding with prior literature also outlines the future research area in the risk and compensation literature.