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The purpose of this paper is to explore the impact of banking concentration on firm leverage in 21 major emerging countries from different geographical regions, controlling for firm determinant and macroeconomic determinant of firm leverage.

This study is based on a relatively large sample of 5,779 enterprises with total 48,280 numbers of observations over the period from 2006 to 2013 and the regression model is performed by applying two-step system general method of moment estimator methodology.

This study finds a positive and significant relationship between banking concentration and firm leverage. Therefore, the overall results follow the information-based theory which indicates lower firms financing obstacles as banks are more concentrated.

Bank-level data of all the countries to measure banking concentration is until 2013, which restrict the empirical analysis until 2013. Also, the study conducts the analysis.

The study enables policymakers, society, and academics to have better understanding on the beneficial effects of alternative banking market structure on firms’ access to credit and therefore, in determining the level of firm leverage in emerging countries.

The study represents one of the limited available empirical researches to examine the beneficial effect of alternative banking market structures of firm leverage in emerging countries.

Using a sample of manufacturing firms listed in China between 2007 and 2019, first, this paper aims to examine whether peer firms influence corporate trade credit supply. Next, the authors examine the channels through which peer firms influence corporate trade credit supply by testing the predictions of rivalry and information theories. Furthermore, the authors examine the heterogeneity of the industry peer effect on corporate trade credit supply. Finally, the authors examine the economic consequences of the industry peer effect on corporate trade credit supply.

The sample includes all manufacturing firms listed on both the Shanghai and Shenzhen securities exchanges for the sample period from 2007 to 2019, and the data come from the China Stock Market & Accounting Research database. The authors use the fixed effects method to examine the industry peer effect on trade credit supply. The results are robust to a series of robustness tests. To address the potential endogeneity problem, the authors adopt appropriate instruments by estimating instrumental variable models (two-stage least square). The authors use Heckman’s two-stage model to mitigate the sample selection bias.

The authors provide strong empirical evidence showing that the industry peer effect on trade credit supply exists in the manufacturing sector. It is also found that both competitive rivalry-based and information-based theories can provide explanations of the industry peer effect on trade credit supply. This process is both active imitation and passive reaction. Additional analysis suggests that the industry peer effect on trade credit supply is more pronounced for state-owned firms, firms with low customer concentration and firms with high geographical proximity. The amplification effect and spillover effect are the economic consequences of the industry peer effect on trade credit supply. In other words, the trade credit supply based on peer effect will not only increase the liquidity risk of the firm per se but also induce and increase the liquidity risk of the industry.

The study makes some important contributions. First, the authors find robust evidence that peer firms’ trade credit supply is an important factor in explaining corporate trade credit supply, which extends the literature by connecting the firm’s trade credit supply with the peer effect. Second, the study provides a new micro-perspective for understanding that firms use trade credit supply as a tool of competition, which proves the importance of rivals’ decision-making as a determinant of corporate decisions. Third, the authors examine the industry peer effect on trade credit supply, which not only helps to guide firms to pay more attention to the potential risk and spillover effects of the trade credit supply decision-making relevance but also helps to clarify the industry interaction phenomenon of corporate decision-making behavior. It is an important practical significance to play a role as a bridge between the microlevel of the firm and the meso-level of the industry. Finally, the study provides inspiration for the formulation of industry norms and policies.

This study examines the effects of comparable companies, within the same industry, on cash-holding (CH) levels of a specific firm in the Stock Exchange of Thailand (SET). Peer effects are hypothesized to affect a firm's average CH levels.

The authors use data of listed firms in the Thai stock markets from 1995 to 2018. The sample consists of 5,277 firm-year observations. The authors perform robustness tests by incorporating gross domestic product, economy and competitiveness.

Peer firms' CH levels correspond positively to the specific firm's CH. This strengthens further for firms with high cash flow volatility during periods of high competition. Unfavorable economic periods also motivate the association between a firm's CH and peer firms' CH.

A policy on CH should account for cash held by peer firms. Firms can justify their CH policy as compatible with peers' cash flows, especially during periods of competitiveness and an unfavorable economy.

The authors provide novel evidence on how emerging markets' CH levels differ from those in developed markets and propose adjusted explanations for the rivalry- and information-based theories. The findings add substantial knowledge to corporate finance by arguing that CH policies are based on peer firms' strategic moves.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the information-based microstructure theory’s effectiveness in explaining short-term disturbances in currency prices by determining whether the price discovery process in the US dollar (USD) and South African rand (ZAR)-USD/ZAR spot market is led by an individual market agent, around an exogenous news event.

The influence of central bank intervention-related events on USD/ZAR volatility is investigated through the application of Brown-Forsythe variance equality tests on individual dealer and market quotes. Furthermore, the study applies bivariate Granger-causality tests to individual dealers’ USD/ZAR spot rate quotes, in an effort to determine whether certain dealers can be established as price leaders around an exogenous news event.

The study finds significant evidence to suggest the USD/ZAR market price leadership of Nomura forex (FX) prior to the public announcement of a South African Reserve Bank intervention-related news event. This finding supports microstructure theory’s assertions regarding the existence of foreign-exchange market characteristics such as trader heterogeneity and private information.

The paper is conducted on a sample of eight USD/ZAR market agents, of which six are offshore dealers, and only two are located locally. Although these proportions are somewhat relatable to the locations of rand turnover, it would still be interesting to investigate the existence of price leadership solely amongst South African authorised FX dealers.

The results suggest the existence and price relevance of private information, as well as the heterogeneous nature of USD/ZAR market participants, based on informational asymmetries. The outcomes of the paper are useful to market participants, researchers, and central banks alike.

Though the study does not impugn the body of work related to the orthodox macroeconomic approaches to exchange rate determination, it seems apparent that much more microstructure-related research still has to be conducted in the context of emerging market currencies. It is this void that the current study has attempted to provide for in contribution to literature.

This study aims to examine the existence of herding and the impact of economic and political factors in the Shariah-compliant stocks of Gulf Cooperation Council markets, namely, Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and United Arab Emirates. This study also seeks to explore the existence of herding under market stress and cross-stocks herding between Shariah-compliant and conventional stocks.

The data period is from 1 January 2016 to 31 December 2021. Panel data regression and panel quantile regression are used to examine herding.

The results show that herding tends to exist in Shariah stocks before the pandemic but is more pronounced in both types of stocks during the pandemic. The empirical evidence shows that economic factors are significant to herding before and during pandemic, whereas the political factors are only shown to be significant before COVID-19. Conventional stocks are correlated to the herding of Shariah stocks but the Shariah stocks have no significant impact on the herding of conventional stocks. Panel quantile regression shows that herding exists in extreme conditions but not all markets perform similarly.

The results of this study imply that the political factor can lead investors to herd. This political factor represents information that is used by investors to herd, consistent with the prediction of information-based theory of herding. Hence, policymakers and regulators need to be wary of any change in the political factors as they may cause movement in stock prices that deviate from fundamental value because of investor herding.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the implications of asymmetric information for price evolution and investor behavior under a rational expectations framework.

The author presents a simple asymmetric information‐based asset‐pricing model to show that private information and its revelation can generate price momentum. To empirically test this implication of the model, Easley et al.'s probability of information‐based trade (PIN) is used as a proxy for private information.

High PIN firms are found to have larger magnitudes of momentum effect even after controlling for size. The abnormal returns are both economically and statistically significant, and cannot be explained by the Fama‐French factors.

This study provides both an information‐based theory to explain the momentum anomaly and empirical support for the theory.

In this research we explore the issue of “competence management,” as usually defined in the corporate vocabulary, mostly in the human resource (HR) function, and more particularly of “strategic competence management” (long-run management of competences which are critical to achieve strategic goals). We try to show that competence management is a dynamic organizational competence. We analyze it in the case of a large European telecommunications company, France Télécom, in the years 2001–2003. The telecommunications sector is characterized by quick changes in technology, markets, and industrial structures, and therefore a high level of uncertainty. It is also a high-tech activity, based upon continuously evolving personal skills which require long education and training times. There is an apparent contradiction between uncertainty, which makes planning difficult, and the necessity to plan new competence development with long response times. This contradiction cannot be solved if competences are defined in a static way, as structural attributes of actual or potential employees or groups of employees. The strategic competence management issue must be considered rather in the frame of a dynamic, process-based view, which involves an on-going collective and reflexive activity of actors themselves to define and manage their competences. We tested process-based competence management in the case of two telecommunication domains: high bit-rate ADSL telecommunications and Internet services to small and medium businesses. The reflexive and collective competence management process had to be instrumented with instruments which did not aim at an accurate representation of competences as objects, but rather tried to offer a meaningful support for actors’ continuous (re)interpretation of present and future work situations in terms of critical competences. As a conclusion we extend the example of competence management instruments to the general issue of management instruments, in the context of uncertain and dynamic environments. Information-based theories of instruments view instruments as specular representations of situations, which allow optimal or satisficing problem-solving procedures. But when business environments continuously evolve and resist prediction, we must move toward an interpretive view of management instruments as meaningful signs, which help actors to make sense of the situations in which they are involved. Their relevance is not an absolute ontological truth but the practical effectiveness of their context-situated utilization and interpretation. A semiotic and pragmatist theory of activity and instruments can then be proposed.

The objective of this paper is to investigate the validity of stock valuation theories and their forecasting ability by conducting an empirical study. It employs four most commonly used theories which are then tested using 19-year banking-firm market data. The usefulness of these models demonstrates with promising results.

This paper conducts a multi-country study using the multi-model testing approach to evaluate validity of theories and forecast accuracy of banking firms. It employs four methodology models used in finance literature; (1) P/E multiples model, (2) accounting-information-based clean surplus model, (3) theoretical model based on Gordon and Shapiro (1956) method and (4) the Damodaran-Kottler Free Cash Flow or FCF theory based on discounting model.

The tests show that the four theories under tests have a significant fit with actual price formation. The explained variation ranges from 72 to 92%, so the explanatory power of the theories accounting for variations in bank prices over 19-year period is substantial. The models fit suggest that the P/E model has superior predictive power followed by the RIM, DDM and FCFE. These findings shed new lights on the relative performance of valuation models.

The study is limited in terms of the sample period size for 1999–2019. The availability of essential financial data prior to 2000 is very limited, so one can understand interpretation of statistical results under certain assumptions.

The paper suggests that one-factor model is better than the two-factor model.

The work done in this paper is unpublished and original contribution to banking and finance literature and also not under consideration for publication in any other journal.

The purpose of this paper is to introduce a dialogically based theory of documentary practices and document work as a promising framework for studying activities that are often conceptualised as information behaviour or information practices within Library and Information Science (LIS).

An empirical example – a lesson on how to read railway timetables – is presented. The lesson stems from a research project including 223 Swedish lessons recorded in Swedish primary schools 1967-1969. It is argued that this lesson, as many empirical situations within LIS research, can fruitfully be regarded as documentary practices which include document work such as reading, rather than instances of information behaviour.

It is found that the theoretical perspective of dialogism could contribute to the theory development within LIS, and function as a bridge between different subfields such as reading studies and documentary practices.

The framework is yet to be applied on a larger scale. This would require a willingness to go beyond the entrenched idea of information as the core theoretical concept and empirical object of study within LIS.

The theoretical framework offers a view of the relations between individuals, documents, and social contexts, through which it is possible to explore the social significance of core LIS concerns such as reading, literacy, and document work.

The theoretical framework offers an alternative to the monologist, information-based theories and models of people’s behaviours and practices prevalent in LIS.

This paper aims to initiate a new, formal theory of sociocultural physics.

Its intended scope is limited to predicting either long‐term, large‐scale or short‐term, small‐scale sociocultural events. The theory that the authors develop, called sociohistory, links three independent but relatable approaches: part of Sorokin's epistemological theory of sociocultural dynamics, Frieden's epistemological theory of extreme physical information (EPI), and Yolles's social viable systems (SVS) theory.

Although not all of Sorokin's ideas are universally accepted, a subset of them is found to be extremely useful for describing the conceptual context of complex systems. This includes how sociocultural processes link closely into political processes.

The theory that develops helps explain how opposing, cultural enantiomers or yin‐yang forces (represented, for instance, by the polar mindsets represented in Islamic fundamentalism and global enterprise) can result in violent conflict, or in either viable or non‐viable social communities. The informations I and J of EPI theory are regarded, respectively, as sensate and ideational enantiomers.

While the resulting sociocultural physics is in its infancy, an illustrative application to the developmental dynamics of post‐colonial Iran demonstrates its potential utility.