Search results

While in the past companies have voluntarily disclosed information beyond the financial bottom line, there is now a trend toward mandatory reporting in many countries. With the adoption of Directive 2014/95/EU, the European Union has taken a decisive step in this direction. However, research on the effects of these obligations is still at an early stage, particularly regarding Directive 2014/95/EU. Therefore, this paper aims to pursue the question of whether the directive has led to an improvement in reporting.

The authors analyzed the reporting of the EURO STOXX 50 companies before and after the directive entered into force. To evaluate the improvement, the authors assigned the individual Global Reporting Initiative indicators to the different information requirements of the directive.

Overall, the authors’ study revealed an improvement in reporting. However, this does not apply to all information categories. A significant improvement can be seen regarding the information on policies and due diligence, principal risk and non-financial key performance indicators. Institutional theory suggests that the observed improvements among these reporting-experienced companies can be understood as the result of coercive pressure triggered by the directive’s requirements.

The authors’ study contributes to the debate on the impact of non-financial reporting obligations by providing empirical insights into the effects of Directive 2014/95/EU. These insights can inform political and managerial decision-making, particularly in view of increasing reporting obligations.

The study aims to analyse annual reports of the non-financial European firms listed at the EURO STOXX 50 index over the period of 2007 and 2011.

This study intends to address two main issues: to what extent the country-level institutional forces compel (directly) firm's risk reporting (RR) behaviour and in which way these country-level institutional forces moderate the relationship between RR and firm-level characteristics.

Main findings indicate that, during this period, the European listed companies disclosed more risk information on a voluntary basis (such as operational and strategic risks) and with better informative content (more forward-looking and focused on positive news). Consistent with institutional theory, findings confirm that the country-level institutional forces explain variations on RR. Additionally, it also indicates that the relationship between RR and leveraged firms is weaker among countries with stronger institutional forces. These findings have several implications for investors and regulators in Europe basically in helping achieve efficiency in investment decisions and to stimulate further efforts to improve RR regulations.

This study makes two major contributions. First, it extends Elshandidy's et al. (2015) work by using other country-level institutional forces that capture the efficacy of corporate boards, the protection of minority shareholders' interests, country's level of democracy, law enforcement mechanisms and press freedom. Second, it uses firms that are considered as a blue-chip representation of super-sector leaders in the Eurozone (but from different institutional contexts). This research setting can be more insightful in shedding some light towards our understanding on how these leading firms can promote innovative and high quality level of RR and how country-level driving forces influence these variables.

This paper aims to test three parametric models in pricing and hedging higher-order moment swaps. Using vanilla option prices from the volatility surface of the Euro Stoxx 50 Index, the paper shows that the pricing accuracy of these models is very satisfactory under four different pricing error functions. The result is that taking a position in a third moment swap considerably improves the performance of the standard hedge of a variance swap based on a static position in the log-contract and a dynamic trading strategy. The position in the third moment swap is taken by running a Monte Carlo simulation.

This paper undertook empirical tests of three parametric models. The aim of the paper is twofold: assess the pricing accuracy of these models and show how the classical hedge of the variance swap in terms of a position in a log-contract and a dynamic trading strategy can be significantly enhanced by using third-order moment swaps. The pricing accuracy was measured under four different pricing error functions. A Monte Carlo simulation was run to take a position in the third moment swap.

The results of the paper are twofold: the pricing accuracy of the Heston (1993) model and that of two Levy models with stochastic time and stochastic volatility are satisfactory; taking a position in third-order moment swaps can significantly improve the performance of the standard hedge of a variance swap.

The limitation is that these empirical tests are conducted on existing three parametric models. Maybe more critical insights could have been revealed had these tests been conducted in a brand new derivatives pricing model.

This work is 100 per cent original, and it undertook empirical tests of the pricing and hedging accuracy of existing three parametric models.

This study aims to identify the ability of gold and cryptocurrency (Cryptocurrency Uncertainty Index (UCRY) Price) as safe haven assets (SHA) for stocks and bonds in both conventional (i.e. stock indices and government bonds) and Islamic markets (i.e. Islamic stock indices and Islamic bonds (IB)).

The authors employed the nonadditive panel quantile regression model by Powell (2016). It measured the safe haven characteristics of gold and UCRY Price for stock indices, government bonds, Islamic stocks, and IB under gold circumstances and level of cryptocurrency uncertainty, respectively. The period spanned from 11 March 2020 to 31 December 2021.

This study discovered three findings, including: (1) gold is a strong safe haven for stocks and bonds in conventional and Islamic markets under bearish conditions; (2) UCRY Price is a strong safe haven for conventional stocks and bonds but only a weak safe haven for Islamic stocks under high crypto uncertainty; and (3) gold offers a safe haven in both emerging and developed countries, while UCRY Price provides a better safe haven in developed than in emerging countries.

Gold always wins big for safe haven properties during unstable economy. It can also win over investors who consider shariah compliant products. Therefore, it should be included in an investor's portfolio. Meanwhile, cryptocurrencies are more common for developed countries. Thus, the governments and regulators of emerging countries need to provide more guidance around cryptocurrency so that the societies have better literacy. On top of that, the investors can consider crypto to mitigate risks but with limited safe haven functions.

The originality aspects of this study include: (1) four chosen assets from conventional and Islamic markets altogether (i.e. stock indices, government bonds, Islamic stock indices and IB); (2) indicator countries selected based on the most used and owned cryptocurrencies for the SHA study; and (3) the utilization of UCRY Price as a crypto indicator and a further examination of the SHA study toward four financial assets.

The literature provides extensive evidence for seasonality in stock market returns, but is almost non-existent concerning the potential seasonality in American depository receipts (ADRs). To fill this gap, this paper aims to examine a number of seasonal effects in the market for ADRs.

The paper examines four ADRs for the period from April 1999 to March 2017 to look for signs of eight important seasonal anomalies. The authors follow the standard methodology of using dummy variables for the time period of interest to capture excess returns. For comparison, the same analysis on two US stock market indices is conducted.

The results show the presence of a highly significant pre-holiday effect in all return series, which does not seem to be justified by risk. Moreover, turn-of-the-month effects, monthly effects and day-of-the-week effects were detected in some of the ADRs. The seasonality patterns under analysis tended to be stronger in emerging market-based ADRs.

Overall, the results show that significant seasonal patterns were present in the price dynamics of ADRs. Moreover, the findings lend support to the idea that emerging markets are less efficient than developed stock markets.

This is the most comprehensive study to date for indication of seasonal anomalies in the market for ADRs. The authors use an extensive sample that includes recent significant financial events such as the 2007/2008 financial crisis and consider ADRs with different characteristics, which allows to draw comparisons between the differential price dynamics arising in developed market-based ADRs and in the ADRs whose underlying securities are traded in emerging markets.

Utilising a database that distinctly classifies firm-level ESG (environmental, social and governance) news sentiment as positive or negative, the authors examine the information flow between the two types of ESG news sentiment and stock returns for 20 companies listed on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange between 2015 and 2021.

The authors use Shannonian transfer entropy to examine whether information significantly flows from ESG news sentiment to stock returns and a modified event study analysis to establish how stock prices react to changes in the two types of ESG sentiment.

Using Shannonian transfer entropy, the authors find that for the majority of the companies studied, information flows from the positive ESG news sentiment to stock returns while only a minority of the companies exhibit significant information flow from negative ESG news sentiment to returns. Furthermore, the study’s findings show significantly positive (negative) abnormal returns on the event date and beyond for both upgrades and downgrades in positive ESG news sentiment.

This study is among the first in an African context to investigate the impact of ESG news sentiment on stock market returns at high frequencies.

It is widely believed that deviating from the “one share-one vote” principle leads to corporate inefficiencies. To measure the market appraisal of this potential inefficiency, this study aims to analyse the market reaction to a change from the “one head-one vote” to the “one share-one vote” mechanism by means of a quasi-natural experiment: a 2015 Italian reform forcing all listed cooperative banks to transform into joint-stock companies.

To investigate the market reaction around the regulatory change, this study uses both a traditional event study and a novel methodology based on the synthetic control method as well as on Bayesian statistical techniques.

This study estimates the market valuation of the effects of the governance change around the event date being equal to a cumulative average increase in market value of about 14 per cent using an event study methodology, and of about 13 per cent using Bayesian techniques.

This study provides evidence on the fact that the voting mechanism significantly affects the market values of companies. The study also introduces a novel statistical technique that can be extremely useful in analysing single-firm event studies.

Using cross-country data on the 1,000 largest global banks for 2019, the paper aims to examine the response of bank risk and returns to the pandemic.

The author employs weighted least squares (WLS) techniques for the purposes of analysis.

The findings suggest that banks with Islamic windows increased their riskiness in response to the pandemic, although there was not much impact on profitability. Additionally, the author categorizes banks based on certain major characteristics and find that these findings are manifest primarily for well-capitalized and less liquid banks.

Research as to the impact of the pandemic on banks' balance sheets has been an unaddressed area of research. By focusing on a large sample of banks across countries with both Islamic and conventional banking presence, the analysis sheds light on the balance sheet response of banks to the pandemic, an aspect that has not been addressed earlier.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the performance of portfolios that are constructed based on environmental, social and governance (ESG) scores and consist of stocks located in Europe and Turkey.

In order to form the portfolios, firstly all stocks are ranked in a descending way based on ESG-based (ESG, environmental, social and governance) scores, separately. Then, 10% of stocks with the highest scores are included in the “Top” portfolio and 10% of stocks with the lowest scores are included in “Bottom” portfolio and totally performance of eight portfolios are investigated. Finally, capital asset pricing model (CAPM) and Fama-French three-factor model are employed as performance measurement benchmarks.

Results obtained from CAPM regression show that using ESG-based scores two portfolios underperform the market index. The results of the three-factor model provide that performances of Bottom ESG and Bottom GOV portfolios outperform the market excess return by 0.57% and 0.53%. The overall findings of this paper indicate that there is no relationship between socially responsible investment (SRI) and portfolio performance. These findings are in line with the efficient market hypothesis which indicates all information is reflected in prices.

The aim of the study is to provide insight on the question of “whether SRI has any effect on the portfolio performance”. As far as the literature review is concerned it is seen that this study provide additional insight by utilizing a longer time span together with data from numerous markets.

This study aims to investigate the association between the presence of a corporate social responsibility (CSR) committee and Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) disclosure, as well as the moderating role of gender diversity in this relation.

The sample consists of 897 annual observations from 238 firms from Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico and Peru for 2018–2020. The data were collected from the Refinitiv database. The proposed model and hypotheses were tested using the feasible generalized least squares estimation technique with heteroscedasticity and panel-specific AR1 autocorrelation.

The results reveal that the presence of CSR committees positively influences the SDGs. Gender diversity positively moderates the relationship between CSR committees and SDGs. Leverage and firm size also positively impact the SDGs. On the other hand, board size and CEO duality negatively affect SDGs disclosure.

This study extends the scope of stakeholder theory by suggesting that CSR committees and gender diversity enable a better relationship for the firm with its stakeholders.

The findings support policymakers and managers in improving sustainability disclosure. In addition, the results demonstrate the importance of CSR committees and gender diversity to meet the stakeholders' demands.

This study demonstrates how firms can improve sustainability issues through gender diversity and CSR committees.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study complements previous literature by being the first to examine the moderating effect of gender diversity on the association between CSR committees and SDGs disclosure in the Latin American context.