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This paper aims to investigate the impact of ownership concentration of the largest shareholder and foreign ownership on the demand for an external audit for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in six Latin American countries. In particular, the authors test whether foreign-owned firms (compared with domestic private-owned firms) and domestic firms with minority foreign shareholders are more likely engaged in audit assurance.

The authors applied the logit model to estimate the impact of ownership concentration and owner/shareholder type on audit demand, using a sample of 4,609 SMEs. The probabilities of being audited for firms in these countries are then calculated from the estimation results.

The empirical results suggest an inverse relationship between ownership concentration and audit demand only for Uruguay and Peru. However, foreign-owned firms and domestic private-owned firms with minority foreign ownership have a high probability of being audited for all sample countries.

Policymakers in developing countries may promote foreign investments in domestic private-owned firms to improve their corporate transparency and governance.

This study contributes to the growing literature on the impact of ownership on audit demand by particularly focusing on foreign owners and foreign minority shareholders. The findings indicate that foreign ownership (either majority or minority) contributes to corporate transparency and business environments in emerging countries.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the impact of audit assurance on tax enforcement, which is represented by whether firms have been visited by tax officials and, if so, the total number of inspections per fiscal year. The efficiency of tax administration is further examined by whether it becomes a binding constraint to a firm’s operations.

The sample consists of 18,746 firm-year observations from 28 transition and market-based economies in Central-Eastern Europe. The binary logit model, the Poisson model and the ordinal logit model are applied to test the hypotheses.

The empirical results show that, while audit assurance does not reduce the probability of being visited by tax officials (regardless of visit times) for the two country groups, firms with audited financial reports meet tax officials less often in market-based economies but not in transition economies. Furthermore, only in market-based economies does audit assurance reduce the probability that tax administration becomes a severe obstacle to firms’ operations.

This study addresses the relationship between tax administration and audit assurance in market-based and transition countries. One implication of the empirical findings is that audit assurance would add benefits to business environments when countries evolve from transition to market-based economies.

This study aims to link the financial cooperation in the Nordic region and the interdependence between the stock markets in this area. The main emphasis is placed on the evolution of this interdependence as the financial integration was proceeding.

Johansen’s cointegration technique and the exponential generalized autoregressive conditionally heteroskedastic model are applied to test the long-run and short-run interdependences, respectively, among Nordic stock markets. In particular, the recursive estimation approach is used to reveal the evolution of the interdependence between those markets.

The existence of two cointegrations over the sample period indicates that the markets depend on each other to some extent. The recursive estimation of Johansen’s model further reveals that the interdependence had been greatly improving until late 2008. The interdependence between those markets is also confirmed convincingly by the short-term dynamics, noting that the spillover effects between most pairs of stock volatilities are witnessed in the empirical results.

The findings show the dynamics of the long-run correlations between the Nordic stock markets, which imply the intrinsic response to the process of financial market reforms, the 2008 global financial crisis and the period after the crisis. The evidenced information about determinants of the interdependence between Nordic stock markets is sending strong signals to investors to enhance their investment strategies.

Most of the existing studies have been restricted to the static long-run and/or short-run interdependence among those markets. However, this study contributes to the literature by investigating the dynamics of interdependence among the Nordic stock markets over time; moreover, the evolution of the market interdependence is sketched closely to the process of the regional financial market reforms.

This work investigates the volatility spillovers across stock markets and the nature of such spillovers through different periods of crises and tranquility.

Using daily stock return volatility data from June 2003 to June 2021, the generalized forecast error variance decomposition method (based on Diebold and Yilmaz, 2012 approach) is employed to measure the degree of volatility spillovers/connectedness among stock markets of 24 Asia–Pacific and 12 European Union (EU) economies.

The empirical results from static analysis suggested that about 28.1% (63.7%) of forecast error variance in return volatility for Asia–Pacific (EU) markets is due to spillovers. The evidence from dynamic analysis suggested that during mid of the global financial crisis, European debt crisis (EDC) and Covid-19, the gross volatility spillovers for Asia–Pacific (EU) was around 67% (80%), 65% (80%) and 73% (67%), respectively. The degree of net volatility transmission from Singapore (Denmark) to other Asia–Pacific (EU) markets was found to be highest.

The findings have crucial implications for the investors and portfolio managers in assessment of risk and optimum allocation of assets and investment decisions.

This study adds to the literature on risk management by systematically examining the impact of global financial crises, EDC and Covid-19 on the market interactions by capturing the magnitude, duration and pattern of the shock-specific market volatilities for a large sample of Asian and European markets using recent and large data set.