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This study examines the association between geopolitical risk (GPR) and corporate tax, which is a major source of revenue for the government and a significant explicit cost for firms. The authors use a comprehensive measure of GPR to study its effects on corporate taxes by using an international sample.

The authors adopt the geopolitical measure constructed by Caldara and Iacoviello (2022) as a proxy for GPR and cash-effective tax rate benchmarked with statutory tax rate to measure corporate tax avoidance. The authors employ panel regression with fixed effects (FEs) to investigate the impact of GPR on corporate tax avoidance. The authors also conduct a battery of robustness tests to ensure the strength of the study’s results.

This study’s empirical results indicate that sample firms increase their tax avoidance amid increasing GPR. Further analyses show that financial constraints incentivize firms to avoid taxes during rising geopolitical tensions. The authors also provide evidence on the role of firm-level and country-level governance in weakening the association between GPR and tax avoidance.

Policymakers and governments may strengthen the enforcement rule to limit aggressive tax practices of corporates during GPR to balance fiscal deficit. In addition, this study sheds light on the debate among administrators and politicians over the efficacy of current tax laws and governance structures in the presence of heightened GPR.

The authors extend the literature on GPR by analyzing its effect on corporate tax avoidance. Unlike existing single-country studies, the authors use a cross-country setup to investigate the impact of GPR on tax avoidance, making this study’s results more generalizable as the authors control for a host of country, industry, and time factors. Apart from political uncertainty, terrorism, and climatic issues, the authors document GPR as a strong macroeconomic driver of corporate tax avoidance. The authors make a new contribution to the literature on the moderating role of governance and institutional factors on the association between tax avoidance and GPR in an international context. The authors also contribute to the literature on macroeconomic determinants of tax avoidance.

The study aims to examine the association between corporate transparency and firm value (capital market effect) and investigate whether auditor choice moderates this relationship.

This study uses the Malaysian Institute of Corporate Governance (2017) data set, which provides scores on anti-corruption commitment, organisational transparency and sustainability of Malaysia’s top 100 listed firms. The methodology entails an ordinary pooled least square regression method for empirical research.

The positive association between corporate transparency and firm value is more evident in anti-corruption and sustainability initiatives. More importantly, government-linked companies have higher scores. Firms with enhanced anti-corruption commitment are more likely to have higher firm value, and this relationship is more evident for politically connected firms. This study also finds that auditor choice is associated with the firm value in the sampled listed firms.

The findings provide implications for investors and regulators on the role of corporate transparency in an emerging capital market.

The study recommends that emerging market regulators continue enhancing corporate governance codes and practices to improve reporting transparency for listed firms.

This study contributes to the growing literature on sustainability disclosures by incorporating corporate reporting transparency, explicitly relating to firms’ commitment to anti-corruption, organisational transparency and sustainability.

This study aims to explore the potential impact of country-level governance in corporate financing structures.

A two-step system generalized method of moment was used due to the endogeneity issue. The whole sample comprises 3,761 firms in five economies – China, India, Pakistan, Singapore and South Korea – from 2007 to 2016.

The results indicate that the debt option for financing is not favorable under governments with an adequate governance arrangement. However, there is a direct and significant link between country governance and equity financing because in adequate governance arrangements, the possibilities of information asymmetry are minimal and businesses consider equity a more appropriate and safer financing instrument. In contrast, firms prefer to trade-credit financing in poor governance economies, which confirms an adverse link between trade credit and adequate governance.

The country’s governance should be considered a sensitive matter when deciding about corporate financing.

This arrangement of variables has not been previously analyzed in the literature, suggesting the study’s novelty.

The increasing globalization and technological advancements have increased the information spillover on stock markets from various variables. However, there is a dearth of a comprehensive review of how stock market volatility is influenced by macro and firm-level factors. Therefore, this study aims to fill this gap by systematically reviewing the major factors impacting stock market volatility.

This study uses a combination of bibliometric and systematic literature review techniques. A data set of 54 articles published in quality journals from the Australian Business Deans Council (ABDC) list is gathered from the Scopus database. This data set is used to determine the leading contributors and contributions. The content analysis of these articles sheds light on the factors influencing market volatility and the potential research directions in this subject area.

The findings show that researchers in this sector are becoming more interested in studying the association of stock markets with “cryptocurrencies” and “bitcoin” during “COVID-19.” The outcomes of this study indicate that most studies found oil prices, policy uncertainty and investor sentiments have a significant impact on market volatility. However, there were mixed results on the impact of institutional flows and algorithmic trading on stock volatility, and a consensus cannot be established. This study also identifies the gaps and paves the way for future research in this subject area.

This paper fills the gap in the existing literature by comprehensively reviewing the articles on major factors impacting stock market volatility highlighting the theoretical relationship and empirical results.

This paper aims to investigate whether executive compensation, corporate social responsibility (CSR)-based incentives, environmental social and governance (ESG) performance and firm performance are the significant predictors of CSR committees, in addition to CEO, firm and corporate governance characteristics, from the tenet of stakeholder and managerial power theories.

Switzerland is an exemplary country from the perspective of corporate governance and executive compensation. This empirical study includes a panel data set of listed Swiss companies, so fixed-effect logistic regression has been used.

It has been found that the companies that offer CSR-based incentives and higher compensation to their CEOs and have better ESG performance are more likely to have CSR committees.

This empirical paper fills the gap in the literature, guides practitioners about the factors that influence the creation and efficiency of CSR committees, and inspires regulatory bodies to ponder on a mandatory CSR committee to form resilient and sustainable organizations worldwide.

COVID-19 has re-emphasized the prominence of sustainability and the stakeholder approach. Thus, this paper indicates that CSR committees require the adaption and implementation of a holistic sustainability policy that integrates both external and internal factors and thereby provides a whole process for sustainability issues.

The impact of CSR committees on corporate social performance (CSP) has already been investigated. However, the predictors of CSR committees have been less scrutinized in the literature.

This paper aims to explore the moderating role of state ownership variables on the relationship between market concentration (MC) and financial statement comparability (FSC) in Vietnam.

This study uses data from the financial statements of 475 nonfinancial listed companies for the period from 2010 to 2019. This study uses both the system generalized method of moments and fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) to consider the correlation and causal–effect relationships of the variables in the model.

The results show that MC has a positive relationship with FSC, and MC tends to exert a stronger impact on FSC for firms with higher state ownership. In addition, this study suggests that some combinations help improve FSC. This study has important implications for investors, managers and especially state-owned organizations when market power becomes fierce.

This study contributes to the literature on the comparability of financial statements in the context of developing countries that have not fully adopted International Financial Reporting Standards. Furthermore, this study applies the fsQCA method to complement the linear regression method.

This paper aims to examine the determinants of the dividend distribution policy in a banking setting.

Using a sample of 48 Islamic banks and 94 conventional banks from 15 Islamic countries over a period spanning from 2012 to 2019, we document the effect of board gender diversity, executive director profile and governance mechanisms on dividend payment decisions. We also analyze the moderating effect of Islamic banks on the relationship between gender diversity and dividend policy.

We find new evidence on the role of women directors in determining dividend distribution policy and confirm the risk aversion hypothesis, hence contributing to the ongoing debate on gender diversity literature. Our results show that the moderating role of Islamic banks is effective only for small banks.

Our findings have practical implications for shareholders, managers and financial analysts as they suggest rationalizing dividend distribution strategies.

Our study contributes to the growing body of knowledge on dividend policy, gender diversity and Islamic banks.

Reacting to the calls in the contemporary literature to further examine the relationship between board attributes and firms’ decisions to obtain corporate social responsibility assurance (CSRA) through the use of pioneering techniques, this study aims to analyse the influence of such attributes together with the existence of a corporate social responsibility (CSR) committee on the adoption of CSRA using fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis (Fs-QCA).

Fs-QCA was performed on a sample of nonfinancial European companies listed on the STOXX Europe 600 index over the period 2016–2018.

The study findings indicate that the decision to obtain a CSRA report depends on a complex combination of the influence of the CSR committee and certain board attributes, such as size, experience, independence, meeting frequency, gender and CEO separation. These attributes play essential contributing roles and, if suitably combined, stimulate the adoption of CSRA.

The study findings are important for policymakers, professionals, organisations and regulators in forming and modifying the rules and guidelines related to CSR committees and board composition.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study represents the first examination of the impact of board attributes and CSR committees on the adoption of CSRA using Fs-QCA method. It also offers a novel methodological contribution to the board-CSRA literature by combining traditional statistical (logistic regression) and Fs-QCA methods. This study emphasises the benefits of Fs-QCA as an alternative to logistic regression analysis. Through the use of these methods, the research illustrates that Fs-QCA offers more detailed and informative results when compared to those obtained through logistic regression analysis. This finding highlights the potential of Fs-QCA to enhance our understanding of complex phenomena in academic research.

This study aims to examine the relationship between corporate social responsibility (CSR) award and sustainability assurance levels for the French CAC 40 companies.

A sample of 57 French companies in the CAC 40 index corresponding to 448 observations was analyzed between 2008 and 2020 using an ordinal regression.

The main results conclude that the inclusion in the Dow Jones Sustainability Index World, the CSR award and the introduction of the Grenelle 2 law have a significant influence on sustainability assurance levels. However, incentive compensation does not appear to be relevant to explain sustainability assurance levels.

The present study focuses on a sample, limited to companies belonging to the CAC 40 index. To enhance the understanding of sustainability assurance levels, this research may include other global sustainability indices, such as the MSCI World and the FTSE4Good World, in the CSR awards.

This study could be useful for audit practitioners, leading them to reconsider their evaluation methods and take into account CSR incentives for a more objective analysis. Regulators should investigate the current CSR issues to improve CSR disclosure standards. Finally, these findings could motivate other researchers to expand the scope of the research to diverse contexts.

This study helps fill the gap existing in sustainability assurance literature by highlighting the relationship between CSR rewards and sustainability assurance levels.

This paper aims to evaluate whether promoter holding influences a bank’s liquidity in India’s leading emerging market. Furthermore, it also evaluates the moderating role of risk-weighted assets (RWA) on the relationship between promoter holding and liquidity.

The data consists of 24 banks for the period of 12 years from 2010 to 2021. Static panel data is used to analyze the relationship between the liquidity coverage ratio (LCR) as the dependent variable, the promoter used as an explanatory variable and RWA used as a moderating variable in this study.

This study concludes that an increase in promoter holding helps to improve the liquidity of Indian banks. Moreover, it also shows that using RWA as a moderating term enhances the relationship between promoter holdings and Indian banks’ liquidity.

This study evaluated the impact of promoter ownership solely on the LCR, a statistic used to measure the short-term liquidity of banks in the Indian setting. Additional corporate governance factors, such as the makeup of the board of directors, relevant ownership concentration factors and external factors with the potential to affect the liquidity position of banks, could potentially be the subject of future investigations.

This paper has both managerial and policy-level implications. It shows that it is advantageous for banks’ ownership composition to include more enormous promoter holdings to enhance banks’ liquidity. Policymakers can, thus, formulate policies to encourage banks to have more extensive promoter holdings.

The impact of promoter ownership on bank liquidity has not been evaluated in earlier research projects. Furthermore, the use of RWA as a moderating variable to determine this link has not been fully investigated, particularly in the context of a developing country like India.