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Purpose: In reality, financial decisions are made under conditions of asymmetric information that results in either favorable or adverse selection. As far as financial decisions affect growth of the firm, the latter must also be affected by either favorable or adverse selection. Therefore, the core objective of this chapter is to examine the determinants of each financial decision and the effects on growth of the firm under conditions of information asymmetry.

Design/Methodology/Approach: This chapter uses data for the non-financial firms listed in S&P 500. The data cover quarterly periods from 1989 to 2014. The statistical tests include linearity, fixed, and random effects and normality. The generalized method of moments estimation method is employed in order to examine the relative significance and contribution of each financial decision on growth of the firm, respectively. Standard and proposed proxies of information asymmetry are discussed.

Findings: The results conclude that there is a variation in the impact of financial variables on growth of the firm at high and low levels of information asymmetry especially regarding investment and financing decisions. A similar picture emerges in the cases of firm size and industry effects. In addition, corporate dividen d policy has a similar effect on firm growth across all asymmetric levels. These findings prove that information asymmetry plays a vital role in the relationship between corporate financial decisions and growth of the firm. Finally, the results contribute to the vast literature on the estimation of information asymmetry by demonstrating that the classical and standard proxies for information asymmetry are not consistent in terms of the ability to differentiate between favorable or adverse selection (which corresponds to low and high level of information asymmetry).

Originality/Value: This chapter contributes to the related literature in two ways. First, this chapter offers updated empirical evidence on the way that financing, investment, and dividends decisions are made under conditions of favorable and adverse selection. Other related studies deal with each decision separately. Second, the study offers new proxies for measuring information asymmetry in order to reach robust estimates of the effects of financial decisions on growth of the firm under conditions of agency problems.

Since Ball and Brown's (1968) seminal paper on the association between unexpected changes in earnings and share prices, there have been an abundance of empirical studies that suggest that announcements of earnings and dividends do indeed convey new and useful information to capital market participants. Most of these studies, however, have examined the information effects of only earnings OR dividend announcements. They did not examine whether the share market evaluates each announcement with respect to the information contained in the other.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the moderating effect of corporate governance on the impact of earnings management on dividend policy.

In this paper, the authors selected French non-financial companies listed on the CAC All Tradable index during the 2008–2015 period. Feasible generalized least square regression method is used to estimate the econometric models.

The empirical results allowed the authors to confirm and/or reject certain hypotheses. First, the ownership concentration seems to positively moderate the impact of earnings management on dividend policy. Another conclusion that the authors have been able to draw is that the effect of earnings management on dividend policy is more favorable in the case of firms with a small director’s board.

Our results have shown that French firms run earnings to inform the market that they can distribute dividends. Therefore, we recommend that the various partners of the firm pay more attention to the governance mechanisms of these types of companies and, in particular, in countries where foreign investors suffer from weak legal protection (Easterbrook, 1984; Gomes, 2000; La Porta et al., 2000 and Athari et al., 2016). In fact, standardization bodies, the Ministry of Finance, external auditors and stock exchange organizer must focus on sophisticated governance mechanisms to ensure better quality of financial reporting.

To our knowledge, no other research has examined whether the impact of earnings management on dividend policy varies significantly with the moderating effect of certain governance mechanisms in France.

The purpose of this study is to assess how the information disclosed in prospectuses impacted the initial public offering (IPO) underpricing at a time of high government interference amid the ongoing pandemic.

The design of this study has several tracks, namely, a macro-level track, which is represented by the government measures to halt the pandemic; a micro-level track, which is followed by textual analysis of IPO prospectuses; and, finally, a machine learning track, in which the authors use state-of-the-art tools to improve their linear regression model.

The authors found that strict government anti-COVID-19 measures indeed contribute to the reduction of the IPO underpricing. Interestingly, the mere fact of such measures taking place is enough to take effect on financial markets, regardless of the resulting efficiency of such measures. At the micro-level, the authors show that prospectus sentiments and their significance differ across prospectus sections. Using linear regression and machine learning models, the authors find robust evidence that such sections as “Risk factors”, “Prospectus summary”, “Financial Information” and “Business” play a crucial role in explaining the underpricing. Their effect is different, namely, it turns out that the more negative “Risk factors” and “Financial Information” sentiment, the higher the resulting underpricing. Conversely, the more positive “Prospectus summary” and “Business” sentiments appear, the lower the resulting underpricing is. In addition, we used machine learning methods. Consisting of more than 580 IPO prospectuses, the study sample required modern and powerful machine learning tools like Isolation Forest for pre-processing or Random Forest Regressor and Light Gradient Boosting Model for modelling purposes, which enabled the authors to gain better results compared to the classic linear regression model.

At the micro level, this study is not confined to 2020, but also embraces 2021, the year of the record number of IPOs held. Moreover, in this paper, these were prospectuses that served as a source of management sentiment. In addition, the authors used a tailor-made government stringency index. At the micro level, basing the study on behavioural finance hypotheses, the authors conducted both separate and holistic analysis of prospectuses to assess investors’ reaction to different aspects of IPO companies as well as to the characteristics of the IPOs themselves. Lastly, the authors introduced a few innovations to the research methodology. Textual analysis was conducted on a corpus of prospectuses included in a study sample. However, the authors did not use pre-trained dictionaries, but instead opted for FLAIR, a modern open-source framework for natural language processing.

This paper considers the post‐listing returns performance of government‐issued Initial Public Offerings (IPOs) in Australia during the period 1989 to 1998. While several studies have considered the performance of government IPOs, most of their attention has been focused on the immediate return performance. Little analysis has been undertaken on the longer‐term performance of government IPOs. It is found in this paper that government IPOs, considered as a whole, are no more underpriced than non‐government IPOs. However, when IPOs involving government monopolies are considered separately from other government IPOs, it appears that their returns are less than those of nongovernment IPOs initially but that these returns rapidly rise giving government IPOs a better long‐term return than non‐government IPOs. It is proposed that this pattern of returns could reflect the allocation process that favors retail investors to the disadvantage of institutional investors.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the interplay between institutional investors' ownership (IIO), politically connected firms (POC) and sell-side analysts' stock recommendations (ASR).

This study employs ordinary least square (OLS) regression to test the hypotheses. The sample comprises 280 Malaysian public listed companies (PLC) and encompasses the 2008–2013 time frame (a total of 735 observations).

The results show a significant and positive link between IIO and ASR. In addition, a negative association is found between POC and ASR. Moreover, the POC weakens the positive relationship between the IIO and ASR.

One important implication of this study is that political involvement in corporate decisions is a prominent characteristic of the Malaysian market, which can significantly affect the information environment and analysts' reactions.

The findings of this study provide useful empirical guidance to the regulators in evaluating the efficacy of recent regulatory initiatives. Investors may also gain useful insights from this study, specifically in recognising the crucial monitoring role played by institutional investors and how politically patronised firms are viewed unfavourably by equity analysts.

This study is one of the first to examine the joint influence of IIO and POC, on ASR.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the relationship between accounting conservatism, corporate governance and political connection in listed firms in Malaysia where political influence plays a significant role in the capital market and in many business dealings.

By utilizing 824 firm-year observations comprising large listed companies over a period of four years from 2004, this study uses ordinary least squares regression models to investigate the relationship between accounting conservatism, corporate governance and political connections in Malaysia. Multiple measures of conservatism developed by Basu (1997) and Khan and Watts (2009) are employed.

The results show evidence of accounting conservatism (bad news being recognized earlier than good news) in Malaysia. Further, the results reveal that better corporate governance structure in terms of board independence is positively associated with accounting conservatism while management ownership is negatively associated with it. However, political connection has a negative moderating effect on the positive relationship between accounting conservatism and board independence. The results also suggest political connections have a positive association with firm’s future performance.

This study is the first in investigating the effect of political connections on accounting conservatism in Malaysian context and how political connections negatively affect the monitoring role of the corporate boards. By directly measuring political connection and controlling for various corporate governance mechanisms and firm-specific attributes, this study contributes to enhance the authors’ understanding of the political influence in financial reporting quality and firm performance in an emerging market setting.

The determinants of dividend policy are a continuing puzzle, as noted by Black (1976). In this paper we review the major issues in dividend policy and relate them to some of the themes explored in companion papers in this volume. The paper is divided into five sections. Section 2 surveys the literature on the information signalling properties of dividends. Section 3 discusses some tax issues related to dividend policy and section 4 draws on some agency costs explanations for dividend payments. The conclusion draws together the arguments and highlights some of the unresolved issues.

This study aims to investigate the effect of the diversity of the board of directors (BOD) and the shariah supervisory board (SSB) on credit risk, insolvency, operations, reputation, rate of deposit return risk (RDRR) and equity-based financing risk (EBFR) of Islamic banks (IB).

The study uses 68 IBs from 19 countries covering 2009 to 2019. BOD and SSB diversity attributes data were hand-collected from the annual reports. Financial data were collected from the bankscope database. The robustness test and two-step system generalized method of moment estimation technique were used to address potential endogeneity issues.

This study provides evidence that diversity in the experience and cross-membership of board members decreases the risk. Gender diversity increases the risk, but the BOD’s education level diversity has no relationship with risk. More interestingly, influences in the experience and cross-membership of the SSB’s members positively influence risk. However, members’ education levels and gender diversity have not been proven to affect risk.

The paper recommends that Islamic banking authorities play a stronger role and make a greater effort in driving corporate governance reform. Also, determining individual characteristics of the board is a requirement to become a member of a BOD or an SSB.

This paper expands the commitment literature through the diversity of the BOD’s and the SSB’s members in terms of their education levels, experience, cross-membership and gender. This study expands the list of potential risks for IBs, by including the RDRR and EBFR.

The purpose of this paper is to examine whether Islamic finance could replace or complement the traditional financial system and could guarantee stability in times of crisis.

To achieve the aim, the authors examined both risk-taking and profitability of 94 Islamic banks (IBs) operating in 18 countries observed during the 2006-2013 financial crisis period. A series of bank-specific and other country-specific indicators are combined to explain profitability of IBs as measured by return on assets and return on equity, and risk divided into credit risk measured by impaired loans/gross loans and total equity/net loans, and insolvency risk measured by Z-score. Indeed, a bank is stronger than another if it is stable with a higher capacity to absorb risks, on the one hand, and increased performance on the other.

Using dynamic panel data econometrics (generalized moment method system), the authors estimated five regressions and found the following results: bank capital is found to be the main indicator that contributes to maximizing profitability and stability of IBs and reducing their credit risk. However, the study of liquidity and asset quality determinants often leads to inconclusive results. Nevertheless, they found that Gulf region-operating IBs are more profitable, more solvent and less risky than those operating in the South East Asian region. At the macroeconomic level, the authors could not find a significant relationship between inflation rate and IBs profitability. However, unlike for IBs in Southeast Asia, the authors found that inflation rate improves IBs stability and reduces their credit risk level.

The results of this study have numerous implications for bank management and the different stakeholders (investors, customers). This study identified several factors that may help bank managers to improve their financial outlook by controlling risk level and profitability. These factors could as well help to understand how macroeconomic indicators affect both banking risk and profitability, in particular Islamic banking. Likewise, portfolio managers can use these results to support their decisions to include IBs in their assets portfolios to mitigate potential risk.

This study contributes to the existing literature in two ways. First, this paper provides fresh data and recent information on Islamic banking in Gulf Cooperation Council and South East Asian countries. Second, the obtained results helped us to conclude that the Islamic financial system cannot replace but rather supplements the traditional system. This result may be explained by the fact that Muslims look for Islamic banking products, which conventional banks are not offering.