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The purpose of this paper is to examine cash savings from six potential sources of cash: net equity issues, net debt issues, internally generated cash flows, asset sales, changes in short-term debt, and changes in net working capital.

The authors use both fixed effects and dynamic panel-data estimations to examine cash savings by using a sample of firms from 72 countries for the period 1991-2010.

The authors observe that net equity issue is the largest source of new funds while cash savings rates are highest for asset sales, changes in net working capital, and net equity issues. Constrained firms have higher total savings rates than unconstrained companies. The authors also find that savings rates are positively related to whether firms perform R & D, multinational status, and protection for creditors and investors.

The results suggest that firms usually use multiple channels when they increase their savings as opposed to relying only on one channel.

We explore the predictive capacity of short-horizon time preference decisions for long-horizon investment decisions. We use experimental evidence from a sample of Canadian working poor. Each subject made a set of decisions trading off present and future amounts of money. Decisions involved both short and long time horizons, with stakes ranging up to 600 dollars. Short horizon preference decisions do well in predicting the long-horizon investment decisions. These short horizon questions are much less expensive to administer but yield much higher estimated discount rates. We find no evidence that the present-biased preference measures generated from the short-horizon time preference decisions indicate any bias in long-term investment decisions. We also show that individuals are heterogeneous with respect to discount rates generated by short-horizon time preference decisions and long-horizon time preference decisions.

This study reports an empirical test of two involvement scales: Zaichkowsky’s personal involve‐ment inventory (PII) and Kapferer and Laurent’s consumer involve‐ment profile (CIP). The purpose of this study is to identify whether these two scales are applicable to financial services. Eight financial services are investigated: the use of a cheque book, overdraft facility, the use of Switch services, the use of a cash machine, savings account, investment services, mortgage services, and personal loan. The empirical findings show that the two scales indicate different levels of involvement in the eight financial services. The PII measure indicates that mortgage, investment and cash machine use are high involvement services. The use of savings account, personal loan, a chequebook, overdraft facility, and Switch services are found to be medium involvement services. The CIP shows that investment, mortgage, and savings accounts are rated as high involve‐ment services. Personal loans, overdraft facilities, Switch card, cash machine, and chequebook usage are in the middle range of involvement. Being a multidimen‐sional scale, the CIP provides more data about involvement. More investigation is needed in order to understand the links between consumer involvement in financial services and customer behaviour. The authors conclude with recom‐mendations for further research into consumer involvement in financial services and its effect on bank customer behaviour.

The profiling of young adult financial behavior can help financial service providers and financial advisors to target suitable marketing resources to specific customer segments. The purpose of this paper is to validate the scale for financial management behavior of young adults in an emerging market, segment these individuals and investigate the impact of demographic variables on key dimensions.

A structured questionnaire is used to validate a financial management behavior scale using data collected from 270 young adults in India. Based on dimensions obtained through factor analysis, cluster analysis is performed to identify young adult segments. Statistical techniques, such as the t-test and one-way analysis of variance, are used to examine the impact of demographic variables on financial management behavioral dimensions.

The factor analysis confirms three key financial management dimensions: cash management, credit management and savings management. Using cluster analysis, the young adults are segmented into three subgroups: responsible customers, credit-oriented customers and vulnerable customers. Young adults in these groups follow hierarchical patterns in terms of financial management behavior.

Since few studies are available from the standpoint of young adults in emerging markets, this study adds value to the literature by investigating the financial management behavior of young adults in India. Notably, it can serve as a reference for comparing similarities and differences on the basis of financial management behavior with other countries and customer segments.

This paper presents a qualitative study on mobile banking technology acceptance by the rural unbanked. The number of mobile phone users has long exceeded the number of people with bank accounts across the world. The purpose of this paper is to determine the factors that will affect the acceptance of mobile banking by the rural unbanked.

The main purpose of this qualitative research is to discover the deeper motivations and associations that underlie an unbanked consumer's intentions to adopt mobile banking services. The use of open‐ended questions in the group discussions allowed participants to explain, comment and share experiences, attitudes, opinions, and beliefs, with specific focus on the consumer (his cognition and emotions as a result of the consumption intentions). Focus groups provide an opportunity to capture the meaning that consumers give to different aspects of reality they live in through group dynamics and interactions.

The findings of the study indicate that perceived usefulness and perceived ease of use from the technology acceptance model, economic factors and trust influence the rural unbanked's intention to adopt and use mobile banking services.

Although the qualitative study brings out the underlying motives of the rural unbanked, it does not statistically test the extension of the technology acceptance constructs and its antecedents that are discovered. Also, there was a limitation in the use of language and transcribing from a native language into English.

The demand for mobile banking services by the unbanked can be linked to their demand for savings and loan services. Therefore, for successful adoption of mobile banking by the unbanked, operators should promote the use of mobile banking services for savings and loans. Firms should further consider educating consumers through demonstrations and training to better equip them to master mobile banking systems. Once consumers feel more competent in utilizing the system, they would find it easier to use and will be encouraged to use it.

The value of the paper lies in the use of a focus group discussion to unveil new determinants of technology acceptance by the rural unbanked and the identification of convenience and affordability as antecedents to perceived usefulness.

The purpose of this study is to examine the interactive impact of tax avoidance and tax risk on the firm value.

This study covers 290 observations on non-financial corporations listed on the Tunisian Stock Exchange for the period ranging from 2008 to 2020, using the multiple linear regression technique.

The results show that tax avoidance positively affects the firm value while tax risk has a negative influence on the company value. More importantly, tax risk moderates the positive impact of tax avoidance on the firm value. Accordingly, tax avoidance must be considered in conjunction with tax risk when studying the effect on the firm value. The findings of additional analyses indicate that when tax avoidance is associated with a high level of tax risk, it negatively affects the firm value. Thus, investors negatively rate the high-risk tax avoidance.

The major limitation of this study is that it focuses only on Tunisian listed companies since their financial statements are publicly available. Although the sample is relatively small due to the problem of data availability, it is satisfactory owing to the twelve-year sampling period (from 2008 to 2020). Research implications- The results obtained are of great interest to researchers as they should be more careful in simply using effective tax rates as a measure of risky or aggressive tax avoidance.

The findings may signal the need for Tunisian firm managers to consider spillovers when adopting risky tax avoidance strategies and to implement a tax risk management policy within the firm. They are also substantial for Tunisian regulators to create requirements for reporting risky tax avoidance practices in the company annual reports to protect the investors’ rights and the society interest in general. The results are also useful for the investors who would like to make good decisions with respect to tax planning strategies. It is not enough to rely on the Effective Tax Rate (ETR) to judge whether or not tax planning is risky. Volatile ETRs, as a proxy of the tax risk, can be useful for them in decision-making.

The results also highlight that risky tax avoidance decreases the firm value, and thus confirm the negative repercussions that such behavior can have not only on the firm, but also on the society in general, as the corporate tax contributes to covering the State public expenditure. Hence, it is considered a general concern.

The present study differs from others in the existing literature. In fact, it examines the joint effect of tax avoidance and tax risk on the firm value for Tunisian listed companies which are characterized by the predominance of agency conflicts between major shareholders and minor ones. Therefore, the authors seek to investigate if small shareholders can penalize risky tax avoidance practices by decreasing the firm value.

This paper seeks to analyse the current poverty situation and poverty alleviation efforts of the NGOs in Bangladesh with emphasis on the impacts of two NGO programmes in two villages of Barisal district.

This research has employed both qualitative and quantitative approaches. The research has primarily used first‐hand empirical data. In order to substantiate primary data, relevant secondary information has also been used. Data were collected through household survey by applying both open‐ and closed‐ended questionnaires. With a view to analysing data, inferential as well as descriptive statistics have been applied.

The findings revealed that the economic condition of the poor in the study areas has not improved much when judged against some selected indicators, namely, income, food and non‐food expenditure, productive and non‐productive asset, food security, and employment creation. The Foster Greer Thorbecke index shows that the majority of the NGO beneficiaries remained below the poverty line in terms of income and the overwhelming majority of them remained below the underemployment line (less than 260 days of work in a year). The regression analysis shows that the income of the households is determined by landholding size, family labour, days suffered from morbidities and employment opportunity. The qualitative data on the perception of beneficiaries on the causes of poverty endorse this finding.

Controversies over the issue of widespread poverty in Bangladesh have been revolving among the government, NGOs and the donor agencies as well. NGOs have been claiming the entire success of the economic wellbeing made to the rural poor. However, this study has directly challenged their claims by casting an empirical lens on the impact of their interventions. This study has detected the paucities of the NGO interventions and gaps between their objectives and their achievement.

Prior literature demonstrates that the effectiveness of bank monitoring decreases when multiple banks are involved, due to a free rider problem, leading to lower firm value. The purpose of this paper is to investigate whether this free rider problem exists in an emerging market context, and whether the relationship between multiple banking relationships and firm value is conditioned on bankers’ incentives to monitor.

The authors use multivariate panel regression to examine the hypotheses. The conditioning effect of the incentive to govern (the amount of average bank lending) is modeled using an interaction variable. Based on the result of the Hausman test, the authors employ two-way fixed effects estimator to estimate the coefficients.

First, the negative relationship between multiple banking relationships and firm value holds true among Indian firms. Second, the authors show that this negative relationship is lessened for firms with high average bank debt or higher free cash flows. The analyses suggest that these moderating effects are related to a reduction in the free rider problem rather than a decrease in financial constraints. However, these results are only significant among larger firms.

Prior literature has not considered the conditioning impact of the “incentives to govern” when examining the free rider problem, inherent in situations where multiple actors are involved. The authors show in this study that the free rider problem disappears when the incentives to govern are considered in the overall research framework.

Status of fiscal health of local governments helps in determining planned budget and realistic action plan for citizens’ wellbeing. This paper aims to assess the fiscal health of local governments in Bangladesh.

Using data from 18 south-western municipalities of Bangladesh during the fiscal year 2018–19, this research measures fiscal health by applying Wang, Dennis and Tu’s solvency test and Brown’s Ten-Point Test.

The result shows that one-tenth of the entire municipalities are endowed with better position, whereas almost 39 percent of municipalities are in the worst situation and nearly 50 percent of municipalities are in the average category. Because of having limited liabilities, the municipalities are endowed with more than enough cash solvency and reasonable level of long-run solvency. The key problems are that budgetary solvency of all municipalities is not satisfactory, and service expenses are more than their revenue generation. This study suggests improving the financial capabilities of the municipalities through properly using their resources, generating loans, and claiming a need-based budget from the central government.

The paper investigates the status of fiscal solvency of local governments in Bangladesh in a new dimension. The findings might be helpful to policymakers in budgeting for development initiatives of local governments in Bangladesh so that citizens’ better wellbeing is ensured.