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This paper aims to assess the measurement of the Corporate Governance (CG) quality of Islamic Banks (IBs) and its effect on financial performance.

In the applied part of this study, a sample of 44 IBs operating in Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, Oman, the United Arab Emirates and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia were investigated according to information provided by the national central bank websites of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries. To measure the governance quality, CG-index was constructed based on three sub-indices which are the Board of Directors (BOD), the Audit Committees (AC) and the Shariah Supervisory Board (SSB) indices.

Findings revealed that CG quality of IBs in GCC countries adhere to 74 per cent of the attributes addressed in the CG-index. The results also showed that IBs in GCC countries valued the effectiveness of SSB much more than the conventional CG mechanisms. Using multiple regression models, findings suggested no statistically significant relation between CG quality and financial performance which would imply that good CG had an insignificant association with high performance in GCC IBs.

The current paper may serve to assist IBs stakeholders to better understand the CG practices of IBs. In addition, the observed insignificant relation between the quality of CG practices and performance should sensitize the IBs regulators in the GCC countries to the necessity of improving the existing CG requirements.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the association between political connections and tax avoidance in Islamic banking industry and to test whether joint audit affects this relationship.

Tax avoidance is measured using effective tax rate while political connections represent an indicator variable that equals 1 if a bank has at least one politically connected director on the board of directors and zero otherwise.

This study documents that political connections are negatively associated with effective tax rate, while joint audit is positively related to the same variable. We also find that the negative association between political connections and effective tax rate becomes insignificant for joint-audited banks, while it remains negative and significant for banks audited by one auditors.

The findings of this study have policy implications for banking industry because joint audit reduces the adverse effect of political connections on tax avoidance.

This study measures and compares the level of compliance with the disclosure requirements provided by the International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) and the Accounting and Auditing Organization for Islamic Financial Institutions (AAOIFI). This study also aims to investigate the factors associated with this compliance in a sample of Islamic banks (IBs) in Gulf Cooperation Council member states.

The sample consists of 39 IBs between 2010 and 2014. Among the selected IBs, 23 banks were complying with the AAOIFI standards and 16 banks were complying with the IFRS standards. An unweighted disclosure index was used to measure the level of compliance with IFRS/AAOIFI disclosure requirements.

It was found that the level of compliance with IFRS is higher than that of compliance with AAOIFI. In addition, the results reveal that compliance with IFRS/AAOIFI disclosure requirements is higher for larger and older IBs. Finally, it was observed that compliance was more noticeable for IBs having a higher leverage and multinational subsidiaries.

These findings would be of great help to regulators and policymakers to better understand the accounting disclosure practices of IBs.

Shariah Board (SB) is considered as a typical corporate governance mechanism for the Islamic banking system. This board takes the responsibilities of assuring the compliance of transactions and operations with Islamic rules and principles. The purpose of this paper is to measure the SB quality and examine its moderating effect on the relationship between financial performance and accounting disclosure quality.

This study used a sample of 90 Islamic banks (IBs) during the period 2010-2014. The accounting disclosure quality and the SB quality were measured using self-developed indices. The moderating effect of the SB on the performance/disclosure relationship was examined using the hierarchical regression analysis.

The main finding of this study is related to the negative moderating effect of SB quality on the relationship between performance and disclosure. Accordingly, it can be said that the higher the quality of the SB is, the lesser the performance affects the disclosure. This result seems to indicate that at high level of SB quality, even when the performance decreases, the IBs engage in complying with accounting disclosure requirements in order to inform the stakeholders on the real situation of the bank.

The finding of this study would be of great support to stakeholders and policy makers to make more pressure on IBs to improve the quality of their SB structure and show more compliance with the governance recommendations. As an extension to this study, further research can examine other Islamic governance mechanisms, such as the Internal Shariah Review.

To the authors’ knowledge, there has been a dearth of studies dealing with the empirical examination of the moderating impact of the SB quality on the association between the financial performance and the disclosure quality. Therefore, this study could be considered a tentative contribution to the literature by providing some empirical evidence on the links between these three variables using the moderation regression analysis.