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The purpose of this paper is to examine the relationship between earnings management and the efficiency of French firms’ investments. It also investigates the moderating effect of board of directors’ features on this relation.

This study is based on a sample of French listed companies from 2011 to 2015, i.e. 435 firm-year observations. The authors use the instrumental variable method based on 2SLS models.

The authors show that there is a negative relationship between earnings management and investment efficiency. This finding supports the theoretical perspective of the agency theory, as the propensity of firms to engage in earnings management practices is associated with high managerial opportunistic behavior and asymmetric information issues, leading to the problem of under and overinvestment. The findings also show that board size, independence and gender diversity are positively associated with investment efficiency. These board features moderate the relationship between earnings management and investment efficiency suggesting that earnings quality plays a more prominent role in guiding managers to choose the right investments when the corporate governance environment is strong.

The negative relationship between earnings management and investment efficiency suggests that firms with lower earnings quality are exposed to high information asymmetries. They are then more likely to deviate from their expected level of investments. In addition, the results highlight the importance of corporate financial transparency and board monitoring to reduce agency costs and ensure the efficiency of corporate investments, particularly in a setting where investors’ interests are poorly protected.

This paper is the first to the best of the authors’ knowledge to examine the effect of earnings management, a metric for earnings quality, on the corporate investment efficiency in France. Besides, they extend previous literature by investigating how board features are able to monitor managerial actions and decisions and therefore to moderate the effect of earnings management on investment efficiency.

This article aims to systematically review the literature published in recognized journals focused on cognitive heuristic-driven biases and their effect on investment management activities and market efficiency. It also includes some of the research work on the origins and foundations of behavioral finance, and how this has grown substantially to become an established and particular subject of study in its own right. The study also aims to provide future direction to the researchers working in this field.

For doing research synthesis, a systematic literature review (SLR) approach was applied considering research studies published within the time period, i.e. 1970–2021. This study attempted to accomplish a critical review of 176 studies out of 256 studies identified, which were published in reputable journals to synthesize the existing literature in the behavioral finance domain-related explicitly to cognitive heuristic-driven biases and their effect on investment management activities and market efficiency as well as on the origins and foundations of behavioral finance.

This review reveals that investors often use cognitive heuristics to reduce the risk of losses in uncertain situations, but that leads to errors in judgment; as a result, investors make irrational decisions, which may cause the market to overreact or underreact – in both situations, the market becomes inefficient. Overall, the literature demonstrates that there is currently no consensus on the usefulness of cognitive heuristics in the context of investment management activities and market efficiency. Therefore, a lack of consensus about this topic suggests that further studies may bring relevant contributions to the literature. Based on the gaps analysis, three major categories of gaps, namely theoretical and methodological gaps, and contextual gaps, are found, where research is needed.

The skillful understanding and knowledge of the cognitive heuristic-driven biases will help the investors, financial institutions and policymakers to overcome the adverse effect of these behavioral biases in the stock market. This article provides a detailed explanation of cognitive heuristic-driven biases and their influence on investment management activities and market efficiency, which could be very useful for finance practitioners, such as an investor who plays at the stock exchange, a portfolio manager, a financial strategist/advisor in an investment firm, a financial planner, an investment banker, a trader/broker at the stock exchange or a financial analyst. But most importantly, the term also includes all those persons who manage corporate entities and are responsible for making their financial management strategies.

Currently, no recent study exists, which reviews and evaluates the empirical research on cognitive heuristic-driven biases displayed by investors. The current study is original in discussing the role of cognitive heuristic-driven biases in investment management activities and market efficiency as well as the history and foundations of behavioral finance by means of research synthesis. This paper is useful to researchers, academicians, policymakers and those working in the area of behavioral finance in understanding the role that cognitive heuristic plays in investment management activities and market efficiency.

This article aims to clarify the mechanism by which herding behavior influences perceived market efficiency, investment decisions and the performance of individual investors actively trading on the Pakistan Stock Exchange (PSX).

The deductive approach was used in this study, as the research is based on the theoretical framework of behavioral finance. A questionnaire and cross-sectional design were employed to collect data from the sample of 309 investors trading on the PSX. The collected data were analyzed using SPSS and AMOS graphics software. Hypotheses were tested using structural equation modeling (SEM).

The article provides further empirical insights into the relationship between herding behavior and investment management and perceived market efficiency. The results suggest that herding behavior has a markedly negative influence on perceived market efficiency and investment performance, while positively influencing the decision-making of individual investors.

The current study is the first to focus on links between herding behavior and investment management activities and perceived market efficiency. This article enhances the understanding of the role that herding behavior plays in investment management and, more importantly, it improves understanding of behavioral aspects and their influence on investment decision-making in an emerging market. It also adds to the literature in the area of behavioral finance, specifically the role of herding behavior in investment management; this field is in its initial stage, even in developed countries, while little work has been done in developing countries.

This study aims to explore the relationship between the level of busyness of Chief Executive Officers (CEOs) and investment efficiency in the context of emerging markets.

The sample includes firms listed on the Indonesia Stock Exchange from 2010 to 2018 using ordinary least square estimation.

The findings suggest that companies led by busy CEOs tend to exhibit lower investment efficiency, thus providing support for the hypothesis that as CEOs’ commitments increase, their ability to concentrate on the company diminishes. Furthermore, our analysis reveals that companies with busy CEOs tend to demonstrate a greater tendency to over-invest, potentially in response to market pressures to showcase strong performance. A more in-depth examination of the data shows that the negative impact of busy CEOs on investment efficiency is especially noticeable in firms lacking risk and management committees (RMC).

These findings have substantial practical implications for the structuring and composition of corporate boards. They highlight the significance of conducting comprehensive assessments to gain insights into the external commitments of incoming CEOs.

This study underscores the importance of establishing RMC.

According to the real environment of China, the authors collect micro data about Chinese family firms (FFs) to explain why some Chinese FFs still tend to introduce external managers though they have to face governance conflict between family-based managers and external managers.

This study analyzes the effect of governance conflict between family-based managers and external managers on firm performance by using ordinary least square test, which is also used to test which factor has influence on governance conflict’s profit promotion effect.

This study finds that governance conflict significantly improves firm performance (profit promotion effect). The governance conflict caused by the introduction of external managers in Chinese FFs can significantly improve a firm’s performance by raising its management efficiency and capital investment.

The governance conflict of the family business needs to be further refined in following research. Besides, this study is only based on the empirical study of cross-section data.

Different from the existing related research is mainly based on the sample data of listed family enterprises, the China employer-employee matched survey data includes a large number of small and medium-sized FFs, and has obtained the actual situation of how many of the middle and senior managers are external not family members.

The purpose of this study is to extend previous literature and examine risk management efficiency among Takaful (TI) and conventional insurance (CI) firms in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) and the United Arab Emirates (UAE). This study also aims to determine whether Takaful firms are more efficient in managing risks, compared to CI firms.

This study examines risk management efficiency among Takaful and CI firms in the KSA and the UAE for a sample of 20 insurance firms comprising 10 TI firms and 10 CI firms for the period 2018–2020. The authors use Data Envelopment Analysis to estimate efficiency scores among insurance companies to compare risk management efficiency between CI and TI companies and apply two-way analysis of variance to statistically analyze the data.

The results of this study show that TI firms have a higher efficiency score than CI firms, but not significantly and that insurance firms in KSA have higher efficiency scores than insurance firms in UAE. The results also reveal that TI firms did not significantly outperform CI firms in managing risks; however, there is a significant difference in efficiency scores among insurance firms in KSA and UAE.

The authors also contribute to the literature by providing important insights into how the operational business environment of the country can influence the risk management efficiency of CI and TI companies.

This study promotes understanding the insurance industry, its efficiency and risk management, thus offering key implications for decision-makers, regulators and managers associated with the insurance industry in UAE, KSA and other emerging insurance markets. Regulators could provide enabling policies that foster and promote the business environment, as there is a need to improve risk management efficiency in the insurance industry. Also, the results of this study show that the operating status of the UAE insurance industry in terms of efficiency and risk management is lower than that of KSA. Hence, it would be useful for UAE managers and regulators in taking steps to improve the overall insurance industry market.

The results of this study make significant contributions by providing new insights to the existing literature on the risk management efficiency in the insurance industry, as it adopts a different methodological approach that examines risk management efficiency among TI and CI companies.

The study of the relationship between external auditing services and investment deviation in a French setting has received relatively little research attention thus far. There are insufficient indicators to measure audit quality and then have a measurable link to investment efficiency. This study is motivated by such a research gap as well as the important role of auditing services in assuring investment efficiency. The purpose of this study is to test whether a good audit quality service improves corporate investment awareness in French-listed companies and contributes to establishing a comprehensive analysis framework for inefficient investment and how audit services have become an important tool to reduce the investment deviation of listed companies in France.

Based on a sample of 89 non-financial French firms listed on the Stoxx 600 Index from 2015 to 2021, this study uses feasible generalised least squares (FGLS) regressions to study the relationship between investment deviation and auditing service quality.

After running an FGLS regression model for two firm groups (overinvestment and overinvestment groups) and testing for a set of control variables, especially COVID-19, the findings show a non-linear correlation between audit service and corporate investment deviation. Both underinvestment and overinvestment decisions are negatively and statistically significantly impacted by audit indicators. Furthermore, involving a high-quality specialised auditor may enhance overall monitoring and lead to a lower investment deviation level. Overall, the empirical results show that a high-quality audit service enhances the investment efficiency of French-indexed companies.

This study offers crucial information that audit regulators can use to better appreciate the advantages of high audit quality and to take seriously the policy issues that affect it. Board members are urged to provide excellent audit quality that improves investment efficiency with careful consideration.

This study contributes to the existing audit literature by illuminating the effect of audit quality services on investment deviation to show a deeper understanding of the factors that contribute to the differences in prior studies’ findings in the field of audit quality impacts.

Owing to the importance of the investment behavior in China, the purpose of this paper is to find the influence of executive network and government governance on investment efficiency.

The paper use China’s listed companies as sample to make an investment efficiency determinant model.

In this article, the authors find that larger executive network and higher government governance will lead to more corporate investment efficient. Furthermore, the informal institution – executive network, is not only an effective way to alleviate financing constraints, but also can solve underinvestment problem. While the improvement of local government governance can provide institutional protection, it will also be more conducive to restrain overinvestment behavior.

The authors have not explored conduction path. Especially, the authors have not examined whether information spillover effect or the release of resources constraints in executive network plays a more important role to ease investment insufficient.

Under the Chinese circumstance, relationship governance can not only promote companies to improve investment efficiency, but also provide an important guarantee for sustained macroeconomic growth.

The goal of the study is to examine the effects of management discussion and analysis (MD&A) sentiment in public companies' annual reports on corporate investment incentives in developing economies.

The authors use sentiment analysis of MD&A texts based on Loughran and McDonald (2011) and combination of panel data regression, logit model and random forest. The text data consists of 3,511 annual reports of Chinese listed companies for the period from 2010 to 2019.

This paper provides empirical evidence of signaling theory that sentiment of annual reports and MD&A influences corporate decisions on both M&A and internal investments. The authors found that comparing to annual reports MD&A sentiment has more stable and significant explanatory and predictive power.

This paper confirms the importance of MD&A sentiment for corporate investment decision taking and provides practical techniques for analysts and researchers to study corporate investment incentives from the point of view of signaling theory.

The study aims to expand the domains of signaling theory and corporate investment valuation by including a broader range of data on companies' M&A and internal investments in developing economies. To explore the impact of MD&A sentiment on corporate investment, a state-of-the-art set of text mining and machine learning techniques is used. The authors' results confirm that MD&A has signaling effect and can get a positive market response. Furthermore, this study enhances the empirical evidence of overconfidence theory, i.e. optimistic management whose MD&A tend to positive overestimates the management's investments decision and also underestimate the potential risk to the firm.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate whether Financial Reporting Quality (FRQ), Corporate Governance and IFRS affect investment efficiency of French listed companies.

Based on a sample of 125 French firms listed on the CAC All Tradable index between 2008 and 2017, the study uses Feasible Generalized Least Squares (FGLS) regressions to examine the relationship between FRQ and firms' investment efficiency.

The findings show that FRQ plays a role in reducing overinvestment and does not affect underinvestment, suggesting that in a code-law country, informal and personal relationships tend to replace the role of financial reports in mitigating information asymmetry. The results also reveal that the relationship between FRQ and investment efficiency increases with better corporate governance and with the implementation of IFRS. However, the results provide no evidence between incentives to minimize profits for tax purposes and firms' underinvestment and continues to be negative for overinvesting companies that have more incentives to manage their earnings for tax purposes.

Our study has some limitations. First, we only examine listed firms, so the results cannot be generalized to unlisted companies that represent the vast majority of French economic activity. Second, this research does not distinguish between government companies and private companies. The two types of companies have different governance mechanisms, financial reporting, disclosure environment and concentration of ownership.

This study suggests that in a code-law country with weak investor protection, FRQ acts as a governance mechanism by mitigating asymmetric information and improving firms' investment decisions.

The relationship between FRQ and investment efficiency has been widely examined for companies in “common law” countries. This study extends the scarce evidence of this relation to companies in a code-law country. It also builds on previous research by introducing new factors never discussed before that could change this relationship, namely corporate governance, IFRS implementation and tax purposes.