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The empirical literature on climate change and agriculture does not adequately address the issue of potential endogeneity between climatic variables and agriculture, which makes their estimates unreliable. This paper aims to investigate the relationships between climate change and agriculture and test the potential reverse causality and endogeneity of climatic variables to agriculture.

This study introduces a geographical instrument, longitude and latitude, for temperature to assess the impact of climate change on agriculture by estimating regression using IV-two-stage least squares method over annual panel data for 60 countries for the period of 1999-2011. The identification and F-statistic tests are used to choose and exclude the instrument. The inclusion of some control variables is supposed to reduce the omitted variable bias.

The study finds a negative relationship between temperature and agriculture. Surprisingly, the magnitude of the coefficient on temperature is mild, at least 20 per cent, as compared to previous studies, which may be because of the use of the instrumental variable (IV), which is also supported by an alternative robust measure when estimated across different regions.

The study provides strong implications for policymakers to confront climate change, which is an impending danger to agriculture. In designing effective policies and strategies, policymakers should focus not only on crop production but also on other agricultural activities such as livestock production and fisheries, in addition to national and international socio-economic and geopolitical dynamics.

This paper contributes to the growing literature in at least four aspects. First, empirical settings introduce an innovative geographical instrument, Second, it includes a wider set of control variables in the analysis. Third, it extends previous studies by involving agriculture value addition. Finally, the effects of temperature and precipitation on a single aggregate measure, agriculture value addition, are separately investigated.

Does the choice of listing process matter in determining a firm's future crash risk? It is understood that the main function of an equity market is to provide price discovery, however, it is not clear whether the choice of listing methods would matter to the shareholders' wealth in the long term. We are the first to answer this question by utilising a hand-collected dataset that identifies all companies that went public via reverse merger (RM) in a growing emerging market.

Using hand-collected data from 2000 to 2018 in China, we follow the literature to construct two crash risk measures for RM and IPO firms. Our main analysis is performed using OLS regressions on the full sample as well as a sample using Propensity Score Matching. Our results hold with a number of robustness checks.

We find that reverse merger (RM) firms exhibit higher future stock price crash risk than initial public offering (IPO) firms. This relationship is more predominant in non-state-owned enterprises, and we find weak evidence suggesting such relationship weakens as firms stay longer in the market. There is no significant difference in future stock price crash risk between RM firms listed during IPO suspension periods and normal IPO firms.

We are the first to study the choice of listing method and its impact on firms' future stock price crash risk.

The purpose of this study is to investigate whether the organizational form of an investment management firm affects the performance of the mutual funds under its operation. More explicitly, this study aims to test whether funds managed by publicly listed firms achieve different risk-adjusted performance when compared with funds operated by privately held investment firms.

This study uses Jensen's alpha to measure funds’ performance based on the Carhart’s (1997) benchmarks and market timing factors. The researchers test the relation between fund performance and organizational form using regressions. It alleviates the reverse causality and endogeneity using propensity score matching (PSM) methodology. The study investigates the difference in performance of funds managed by public firms on the post- vs pre- initial public offering (IPO) basis. Alternatively, this study tests the performance change post-public listing of the parent firm. It computes the difference for a matched sample of funds managed by private firms that were likely to go public but did not. The researchers match funds using PSM methodology.

This paper provides robust evidence that publicly traded management companies administer relatively under-performing mutual funds in comparison to those managed by privately held firms. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first paper that confirms that organizational decision is endogenous to performance. The study finds that after a privately held company goes public, the performance of their mutual funds and the performance of the matched group funds, whose companies remained private at the same time, tends to decline, compared with companies prior to the public offering. However, the decline in mutual fund performance is larger for the companies who chose to pursue their IPO.

The contribution of this study to the literature is twofold. First, while there is a wealth of literature on the impact of ownership structures on corporate performance, there are very few studies focused on mutual fund markets, despite the evidence that supports a generally mixed effect. This study confirms that the performance of mutual funds managed by publicly traded investments firms is lower than that of funds managed by privately held firms. Second, the organizational decision (private vs public) is not exogenous but depends on the actual funds’ performance.

This study aims to investigate the relationship between boardroom gender diversity (BoGD) and risk-taking by property-liability (P-L) stock insurers from an analytical framework that control for organizational form and ownership structure. It relies on the behavioral agency model, the resource dependency theory and the concept of socioemotional wealth (SEW).

This study builds on an unbalanced panel of 2,285 firm-year observations from 232 European and US P-L stock insurers covering the period 2010–2019 and measure risk-taking by using four proxies: total risk (TR), upside risk (UpR), downside risk (DwR) and default risk (DR). Reverse causality and endogeneity concerns are treated by applying different approaches.

Findings suggest that BoGD mitigates the TR, DwR and DR but does not interfere with the UpR, which conceptualizes firm expectations to enhance patrimony and safeguard SEW for heirs, especially in family-owned insurers. The findings hold in various robustness checks including endogeneity and alternative specifications of BoGD and risk-taking.

This study contributes to practice by contrasting the role of female directors’ bevahior when assuming risk, which seems significantly different depending on the risk-taking specification and the organizational form. The author advises policyholders and policymakers to look at closely on BoGD and ownership structure as they affect insurance company risk-taking.

This study takes a more direct approach to highlight the BoGD’s effect on corporate risk-taking by focusing on the insurance sector which is characterized by risk and uncertainty bearing. To the best of the author’s knowledge, this is the first study to consider the full range of the stock organizational forms and the degree of family control in displaying this effect in both widely traded and closely traded insurers and to assess risk-taking from both market-based and accounting-based aspects.

The authors' work aims to identify the employer-specific drivers of the college (or university) wage gap, which has been identified as one of the major determinants of the dynamics of overall wage and income inequality in the past decades. The authors focus on three employer-level features that can be associated with asymmetries in the employment relation orientation adopted for college and non-college-educated employees: (1) size, (2) the share of standard employment and (3) the pervasiveness of incentive pay schemes.

The authors' establishment-level analysis (data from the Basic Survey on Wage Structure (BSWS), 2005–2018) focusses on Japan, an economy characterised by many unique economic and institutional features relevant to the aims of the authors' analysis. The authors use an adjusted measure of firm-specific college wage premium, which is not biased by confounding individual and establishment-level factors and reflects unobservable characteristics of employees that determine the payment of a premium. The authors' empirical methods account for the complexity of the relationships they investigate, and the authors test their baseline outcomes with econometric approaches (propensity score methods) able to address crucial identification issues related to endogeneity and reverse causality.

The authors' findings indicate that larger establishment size, a larger share of regular workers and more pervasive implementation of IPSs for college workers tend to increase the college wage gap once all observable workers, job and establishment characteristics are controlled for. This evidence corroborates the authors' hypotheses that a larger establishment size, a higher share of regular workers and a more developed set-up of performance pay schemes for college workers are associated with a better capacity of employers to attract and keep highly educated employees with unobservable characteristics that justify a wage premium above average market levels. The authors provide empirical evidence on how three relevant establishment-level characteristics shape the heterogeneity of the (adjusted) college wage observed across organisations.

The authors' contribution to the existing knowledge is threefold. First, the authors combine the economics and management/organisation literature to develop new insights that underpin the authors' testable empirical hypotheses. This enables the authors to shed light on employer-level drivers of wage differentials (size, workforce composition, implementation of performance-pay schemes) related to many structural, institutional and strategic dimensions. The second contribution lies in the authors' measure of the “adjusted” college wage gap, which is calculated on the component of individual wages that differs between observationally identical workers in the same establishment. As such, the metric captures unobservable workers' characteristics that can generate a wage premium/penalty. Third, the authors provide empirical evidence on how three relevant establishment-level characteristics shape the heterogeneity of the (adjusted) college wage observed across organisations.

This study aims to determine whether the stock holdings of equity mutual funds are informative for predicting future stock performance in the Chinese market. It is a puzzle that actively managed mutual funds underperform passive benchmarks, whereas retail investors still delegate investment decisions to the fund managers. The present study sheds light on whether mutual fund managers possess security selection skills in their top ten holdings.

By regression analysis and portfolio sorting, this study focuses on 830 Chinese A-share stocks in the industry research reports from the Guotai Junan Securities Company. It collects mutual fund's top ten holdings data from the Wind Financial Terminal between 2019Q1 and 2021Q1. As robustness checks, the result holds for the fixed-effect model, an additional measure of ranks in the top ten holdings, the predictability test based on the confusion matrix and two stage least square (2SLS) regression.

The authors find that the top ten holdings by equity mutual funds are informative for predicting stock performance and can provide valuable information for investors to support their decision-making.

The findings of this study provide insightful guidance for retail investors in making investment decisions and support the hypothesis that active fund management adds value.

Firstly, the authors find that the top ten holdings of Chinese mutual funds show significantly positive signals for future stock excess returns, indicating the selection skills of fund managers. Secondly, the above positive relationship exhibits a diminishing marginal effect with more funds holding this stock. Thirdly, the authors find that the predictability horizon of the number of overweighing funds is up to three quarters and then diminishes in the fourth quarter. Finally, investors have a 59% prediction accuracy for the whole stock sample and an 85% precision conditional on the predicted positive subsample to outperform the market. The authors also address the endogeneity and reverse causality issues.

This paper aims to examine the connection between digital payments, ownership structure, and bank performance in Jordan, as well as investigate the moderating role of the independent director in the said relationship.

The study uses data from 12 Amman stock exchange-listed commercial banks, covering the period from 2010 to 2023. This paper employs econometric analysis of panel data, including ordinary least squares (OLS) regression as the primary approach, as well as the generalised method of moments, the two-stage least square (2SLS), and the dynamic model to deal with causality and endogeneity issues in the proposed equations. This ensures that the results are valid.

The results indicate that digital payments and ownership structure have a significant positive connection with bank performance. Additionally, the independent director variable appears to play a substantial and positive moderating role in the link between ownership structure (e.g. institutional ownership) and bank performance. These results strengthen and support the claims of agency theory and the information systems success model.

Overall, this research helps stakeholders, bankers, managers, investors, customers, and policymakers, identify the influence of digital payment and ownership structure on bank performance in developing economies such as that of Jordan.

This investigation offers a unique understanding by illuminating how digital payment and ownership structure affect bank performance in a developing country such as Jordan. Additionally, it opens avenues for future research to delve into this literature domain in North African and Middle Eastern nations, with a particular focus on Jordan. This investigation is among the initial explorations in Jordan that aim to elucidate these relationships. On the theoretical level, it adds to the agency theory and IS model. It provides new insights into the dynamics of industry banking in developing nations (i.e. Jordan).

India has mandated corporate social responsibility (CSR) expenditure under Section 135 of the Indian Companies Act, 2013 – the first national jurisdiction to do so. The purpose of this paper is to examine the impact of mandated CSR expenditure on firms’ stock returns by using actual CSR spending data, whereas the previous studies mostly focus on voluntary CSR proxied by CSR scores.

The authors estimate their baseline regression by using ordinary least squares(OLS) method. Although the baseline regression involving CSR expenditure and stock returns using ordinary least squares method are estimated, endogeneity and reverse causality biases are addressed by using two-stage least squares and generalized method of moments approaches. These approaches contribute mitigating endogeneity bias and biases associated with unobserved heterogeneity and simultaneity.

The findings document that mandatory CSR expenditure has a negative impact on firms’ stock returns which supports the “shareholders” expense’ view. This result remain robust after controlling for endogeneity bias and the use of both standard and robust test statistics. The authors however observe that this result holds for the firms with actual CSR expenditure equal to the mandated amount but does not hold for the firms with actual CSR expenditure greater than the mandated amount. Therefore, the authors provide evidence that CSR expenditure’s impact on stock returns depends on whether firms simply comply the regulation or voluntarily chose an amount of CSR expenditure above the mandated amount.

The primary contribution is to present a valid and robust evidence of negative effect of mandated CSR spending on firms’ stock returns when the mandatory CSR spending rule is already in place. This study contributes by examining the impact of mandated CSR spending on stock during post-implementation period (2015-2017), whereas other studies by Dharampala and Khanna (2018); Kapoor and Dhamija (2017); and Mukherjee et al. (2018) mainly examined the impact of legislation on Indian CSR. The authors use mandated actual CSR expenditure, whereas previous studies mostly focus on voluntary CSR proxied by CSR scores.

The quality of financial reporting for the financial institutions is vital for the public, as the negative consequences of manipulated financial statements will not only affect shareholders but also the regulators’ reputation and the society at large. The purpose of this paper is to assess the association between different corporate governance mechanisms and their impact on audit and reporting quality. The gender factor is introduced from a diverse boards’ perspective to highlight any impact of female presence on the quality of financial statements.

The authors examine a sample of financial institutions listed on the FTSE-350 index for the years 2011 to 2015. The financial sector has its own and different regulations, and financial reporting framework and auditors are expected to behave into more scrutiny. Bloomberg database is used to obtain governance and financial data, while firms’ annual reports are used to collect audit fees and audit committee information. A panel data regression is used to test hypotheses. The authors also control for unobservable heterogeneity, reverse causality and endogeneity.

The results suggest that boards with larger size and higher independence pay higher audit fees to enhance the monitoring capacity and protect the wider group of stakeholders. The results also show that women on boards are likely to reduce the risk of manipulated financial statements, as women are more inclined toward truthfulness, cautiousness and conservatism. In addition, the reported results show that audit committees with more independent members are more inclined toward obtaining higher quality audit to enhance firm’s reporting quality.

Given the recent governments’ intervention to avoid financial institutions’ negative impact on the economy, this study is relevant and provide policymakers insights into the existing relationships between audit fees and financial institutions’ governance structure.

In this paper, the authors examine the association between the amount of continuing professional education (CPE) hours per staff and audit quality in terms of discretionary accruals and audit opinion.

Several methodologies are adopted to test the hypotheses, including the ordinary least square (OLS) and logistic regression (Logistic). The authors also employ instrument variables regression with two least square (IVREG with 2SLS) and instrument variables probit model (IVProbit) to address the possible endogeneity and strengthen the validity of the main estimation results.

The main results show that there is a positive and significant relationship between CPE hours per staff and audit quality. As the authors grouped CPE into four areas (finance, auditing and accounting, tax, law and regulations and others) the results are more robust for the sub-sample “accounting and audit” and “others”. Moreover, the findings of this study suggest that CPE hours per staff do not affect audit quality significantly for Big4 audit firms compared to non-Big4 firms.

The sample size of the present study is quite small because the transparency reports of the audit firms in Turkey have been available since 2013 and the authors could not reach some auditor demographics at the individual level and some attributes at the audit firm level. Besides, some alternative audit quality measures, such as audit effort, audit fees are not employed because they are not disclosed.

This study contributes to the audit literature using Turkish audit firms. The authors believe that the setting of Turkey may yield interesting results because of the data it provides.