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The purpose of this paper is to examine industry herding among the institutional investors and to find whether their herding behaviour is intentional or unintentional.

The study uses Lakonishok et al. (1992) model to examine the presence of industry herding behaviour among institutional investors. To determine whether the herding observed is intentional or unintentional, herding measure is regressed with volatility, volume, beta and return. The period of the study is from 1 April 2005-31 March 2015.

The findings of the study showed that though institutional investors have herding tendency towards most of the industries, in the overall period industry herding was not significant. The herding found in some industrial sectors was linked to economic performance of those sectors in India during the period of study and hence the herding was unintentional in nature.

This is the first attempt to study industry herding among institutional investors and their intent in Indian market ever since the country opened its market to foreign investors in a big way. Present study is limited to the use of only bulk/block data instead of the entire trading data for the period.

This study is the first attempt to investigate industry herding behaviour of institutional investors in the market using their bulk and block trading data. The herding observed in well performing industries has been shown to be unintentional and hence rational. The results indicate that the entry of big institutional investors, including foreign institutions into the Indian market has not destabilised the market by irrational herding.

It is widely accepted that good health and education are important components of human capability. Although China has made encouraging progress in education and health causes, the role of poor health as an intervening factor in education has not been fully recognized. Iron deficiency is the major micronutrient deficiency encountered by children and adolescents. Many medical and social studies have found a negative correlation between iron deficiency and children physical growth and cognitive development. However, few of the existing literatures work to the conclusion of a causal relationship considering the endogenity problem in the estimation of a human capital model. The purpose of this paper is to study the iron status of elementary school children living in the poor countryside of western China and its educational consequence with the application of instrumental variable (IV) estimation.

An analytical framework of academic achievement production is adopted in the paper to empirically identify the relationship between iron deficiency and academic achievement to estimate the impact.

Using a sample of 45,549 school children from Gansu, the paper finds that around 86 per cent of the sample children are iron deficient and 40 per cent of the sample children are suffering from iron deficiency anaemia. The use of IV is innovative in identifying the endogenous health variable, namely iron deficiency.

This paper enriches existing studies on children health and education. IV estimation indicates that iron deficiency has a significant adverse impact on school children academic achievement. The paper suggests health intervention, such as iron intake fortification, as a possible measure for education cause.

Although it is a widely accepted fact that climate change can negatively impact on tourism demand and affect the economies at the socio-economic level, empirical studies on the climate change tourism development nexus has been quite scant, especially for the case of island economies that are heavily dependent on tourism. This study aims to supplement the literature on climate change and tourism by empirically assessing the relationship between climate change and tourist arrivals for the case of 18 small island developing states over the period from 1989 to 2016.

This paper uses dynamic panel data techniques, namely, a panel vector autoregressive framework, which accounts for dynamic and endogeneity issues.

The results from the analysis confirm the existence of a significant relationship between climate change and tourism demand in both the long-run and short run. Further analysis shows a bi-directional causality between climatic change and tourism demand while the study also confirms the tourism led growth hypothesis.

This research supplements the literature on the tourism-environment link, especially for tourism dependent island economies.

Results from this study are important to policymakers who should spare no effort to mitigate the effect of adverse climatic change in the context of tourism development.

This study is built on a unique data set for a sample of island economies and interestingly adopts dynamic panel data analysis to account for dynamics and endogenity in the climate change-tourism development nexus.

The purpose of this paper is to examine empirically the sources of economic growth based on an augmented Mankiw, Romer, and Weil's model which considers human capital in the forms of both health and education for a group of East Asian economies including China.

Empirical results are based on the analysis of a panel dataset from 1961 to 2007. Sub‐sample estimation for the post‐1997 Asian Financial Crisis period is also considered for comparison purposes.

The impact of the stock of health and education on economic growth is statistically significant for both the whole sample and sub‐sample period. However, the impact of investment in education on economic growth is a little “fragile”. The statistical results show that the statistical impact of health on economic growth is stronger than that of education. It seems that it is more plausible for the policymakers in East Asia to invest more in health than educational human capital.

This paper is one of the first empirical studies to analyze the effect of human capital in the form of both health and education on economic growth in East Asia.

Legal intermediation is an emerging theoretical concept developed to grasp the importance of the process and actors who contribute to legal endogenization, in particular in the field of economic activities and work governed by various public regulations. This chapter proposes to extend the analytical category of legal intermediary to all actors who, even if they are not legal professionals, deal on a daily basis with legal categories and provisions. In order to deepen our understanding of these actors and their contribution to how organizations frame legality, this chapter investigates four examples of legal intermediaries who are not legal professionals. Based on field surveys conducted over the past 15 years in France on employment policy, industrial relations, occupational health and safety regulation, and forensic economics, I make three contributions. First, the cases show the diversity of legal intermediaries and their growing and increasingly reflexive roles in our complex economies. Second, while they are not legal professionals per se, to different degrees, these legal intermediaries assume roles similar to those of legal professionals such as legislators, judges, lawyers, inspectors, cops, and even clerks. Finally, depending on their level of legitimacy and power, I show how legal intermediaries take part in the process of legal endogenization and how they more broadly frame ordinary legality.

Researchers began investigating the diffusion of renewable energy technologies (RETs) in the late 1990s, and, up to today, a variety of authors have presented different approaches to understand the special characteristics of RET diffusion. However, one factor has been thus far disregarded in the research: the influence of raw material prices on RET diffusion. The dependence of a multitude of technologies on raw material prices became especially apparent in recent years due to rather sudden and volatile price movements in raw material markets. Thus, the aim of this work is to contribute to the research by providing evidence for a direct linkage between raw material price developments and RET diffusion.

A theoretical framework used in this article derives from the concept of induced diffusion. This empirical study is based on publicly available data of 18 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries over 20 years and uses multivariate regression analysis to identify the corresponding diffusion models for selected established and emerging RETs.

Results reveal that crude oil prices play a crucial role in the diffusion of emerging RETs. In addition, a joint reflection of induced diffusion and path dependencies as the theoretical foundation of RET diffusion models might be reasonable.

This paper makes a significant contribution to the literature on induced diffusion in the field of renewable energies by providing insights from publicly available data from 18 OECD-countries. The findings are highly relevant for managers of the energy industry and policymakers in this field.

Cybersecurity disclosure (CSD) provides users with valuable information and significant insights about a firm's susceptibility to cyber risk and its management. It is argued that the board of directors, with its oversight role, should be vigilant in managing cyber risk and disclosures. This study aims to measure the extent of CSD of the banking companies and examines the association between the characteristics of board composition (i.e. board size, board independence and gender diversity) and CSD.

This study adopted automated content analysis to find out the extent of CSD in the listed commercial banks of an emerging country, Bangladesh, where CSD is voluntary. Further, multiple linear regression is applied to determine the relationship between board composition and CSD.

The findings reveal an increasing trend of CSD over the sample period (2014–2020). The study confirms a significant positive relationship between board independence and CSD. The study also demonstrates that the higher presence of female directors on the board is associated with higher CSD. However, no consistently significant relationship is found between board size and CSD.

The study is based on listed banking companies only. Hence, the results can not be generalised to companies in other sectors. Also, it is important to acknowledge that we focused on the quantity (not the quality) of CSD contained in annual reports.

The study provides an overall understanding of current trends of CSD in the Banking sector of a developing country. Regulators may use our findings to understand the current level of CSD and assess the need for issuing guidance in this regard. The association between board composition and CSD has implications both for banks when selecting board members and policymakers when establishing requirements concerning board composition under corporate governance guidelines.

This is one of the very few studies in the context of an emerging economy where CSD is voluntary. The paper contributes to a narrow stream of research investigating CSD and its association with board composition. Notably, it contributes to understanding how board composition is associated with CSD in the banking industry, which is highly exposed to cyber risk.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the relationship between corporate governance mechanism and firm value of the listed companies in China. Does the better corporate governance lead to the higher firm value? Or does the higher firm value make it easy to choose a better governance mechanism? Or they affect each other? In other words, this paper tries to answer whether the corporate governance mechanism is only decided by institutional arrangement, or by market choice according to firm value or performance or by the interaction of institutional arrangement and market choice? It tries to answer whether institutional arrangement maximizes the firm value, or an invisible hand pushes them to arrive at its maximum.

This paper establishes an analytic framework of simultaneous equations based on causality, which includes five endogenous variables: ownership of larger shareholders, managerial ownership, director compensation, debt financing and firm value. It adopts 1,644 data samples from 274 Chinese listed companies in Shanghai and Shenzhen Stock Exchange during 2007- 2012 after the non-tradable shares reform. Ordinary least squares (OLS) estimation of single equation, 2SLS and 3SLS estimation of simultaneous equations are respectively done to show the differences of these three kinds of estimations.

The empirical results show that differences exist among OLS, 2SLS and 3SLS estimation. Finally, 3SLS estimation should be adopted because the OLS and 2SLS estimation are biased. There are endogenous relationships between corporate governance mechanism and firm value. Through the 3SLS estimation, it is found that first, ownership concentration and firm value affect each other positively. Second, managerial ownership and firm value affect each other positively; third, director compensation and firm value affect each other negatively, while director compensation and firm performance affect each other positively. Finally, debt financing level and firm value are negatively related to each other.

It means that ownership of large shareholders, managerial ownership, director compensation and debt financing in the Chinese listed companies are found to have a root in the interaction between institutional arrangement and market choice. It is also found that adverse selection occurs when creditors loan to the listed companies. Managerial compensation is positively related to accounting profit, but it is negatively related to firm value because managers increase profit due by earning management. This could only increase the accounting profits and obtain huge cash compensation, but not increase firm value and even harm the interests of shareholders.

This paper not only shows the difference between OLS and 2SLS estimation but also compares the estimation of 2SLS and 3SLS in terms of empirical methods. It gives answers to the following questions: whether the relationship is one-way causality or bilateral causality between ownership concentration, managerial ownership, director compensation and firm value; whether governance mechanism affects firm value by institutional arrangement, or market drives both of them to strike a balance by an invisible hand. In other words, does it make them arrive at equilibrium through the competitive selection process when shareholders, directors, managers and creditors attempt to maximize themselves of their interests?

The purpose of this paper is to empirically investigate the impact of two monitoring mechanisms: family ownership (FO) and financial reporting quality (FRQ) on investment efficiency (IE) over the period of 2007–2014 for listed firms on the Pakistan Stock Exchange.

The authors employ two-dimensional pooled OLS cluster at the firm and year level, two-stage least square regression and feasible generalized lease square regression regression methods.

The findings suggest that higher FRQ and FO are associated with higher IE. Further, the authors report that higher FRQ and FO mitigate over- and under-investment. The impact of FRQ on IE is stronger (weaker) for family-controlled businesses. The results for these particular estimates are robust for alternative estimation techniques and measures of FRQ and FO.

The study draws on both agency and behavioral agency theories and therefore contributes to the literature in the following ways. First, the authors examine a relationship between FRQ and IE. Second, the authors test the impact of FO on IE. Third, the authors test the moderating impact of FO on the relationship between FRQ and the IE of family and non-family firms in relatively less regulated emerging market.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the cross-impact of leverage and performance for firms operating in the developed and frontier bank-based economies.

This study uses annual panel data for a sample of 400 firms over a period of 27 years from 1990 to 2016. The sample sample firms consist of developed, Germany, France and Japan, and frontier including Argentina and Sri Lanka bank-based economies firms. The authors employ a simultaneous equation modeling consisting of two equations estimated using the two-stage least squares procedure to examine the cross-relationships between leverage and performance after controlling for other firm-level variables like size, growth and liquidity.

The empirical results are presented in two sets. First, in the case of firms in the developed bank-based sample, the authors find a negative debt-to-performance relationship and a negative performance-to-debt relationship. This inconsistent negative debt–performance relationship implies that firms operating in these economies use debt beyond a threshold limit, which, in turn, increases agency issues between the managers and debt-holders, thereby influencing firm performance adversely. Second, for frontier economies firms, the authors find a positive debt-to-performance relationship in line with the “trade-off theory.” Furthermore, the authors find a negative performance-to-debt relationship for both sub-samples in line with the “pecking-order theory.”

The study is distinct from earlier empirical studies and contributes largely to the existing literature. First, it emphasizes whether financial leverage influences firm performance in bank-based economies as firms operating in such systems are exposed directly to the strict regulatory environment. Second, it investigates whether any reverse relationship emanating from firm performance to capital structure holds for firms of these countries. This issue, to the best of author knowledge, is unanswered in previous research, more specifically for developed and frontier bank-based economies. Moreover, the results are relevant, as firm managers, analysts and policymakers must consider the importance of such cross-debt-performance relationships, while determining the optimal capital structure, in the bank-based economies.