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This study aims to investigate the impacts of the psychological behaviors of managers, including entrenchment, myopia, narcissism and overconfidence, on money laundering at Iranian companies listed on the Tehran Stock Exchange.

The present study is descriptive-correlational in terms of methodology and applied research in terms of objectives. The statistical population consisted of all companies listed on the Tehran Stock Exchange during 2013–2019. A total of 150 companies were selected as samples via screening. Logistic regression was used to analyze the data and test the hypotheses in EViews v10.

The findings revealed that management entrenchment, managerial myopia, managerial narcissism and managerial overconfidence have significant impacts on money laundering.

This study pioneer investigating the impacts of psychological behaviors among managers on money laundering in Iran. As an economic crime, money laundering poses an adverse impact on economic growth in countries. The continuous monitoring of manager performance and the deployment of performance measurement systems could prevent the negative impacts of manager behavior on money laundering.

The purpose of this paper is to explain whether the level of managerial quality and growth opportunities influences the operating and return performance between single and dual class IPOs.

The sample includes 281 initial public offerings under a dual class share structure. This paper measures managerial ability using a score method design produced by (Demerjian et al., 2012). This paper follows (Chemmanur et al., 2011) in measuring post-IPO operating performance between dual and single-class firms. This paper follows Lyon et al. (1999) and Chemmanur et al. (2011) in measuring long-term post-IPO buy-and-hold return performance. This paper employs two measures of growth/investment using Tobin’s q and expenditures such as capital, research and development, and selling, general and administrative scaled to total assets (Daniel et al., 2016).

Firms with high-quality managers experience more underpricing than low-quality managers. Likewise, dual class firms of all manager and growth types hold less cash and leverage. Using Tobin’s q as a proxy for growth, dual class firms experience higher post-IPO operating performance regardless of managerial quality. Furthermore, the findings indicate minimal evidence that dual class firms underperform single-class IPOs, lending minimal support for the managerial entrenchment hypothesis.

This paper is the first to partition dual and single-class IPOs based on managerial quality and growth opportunities to test long-term differences in operating and return performance.

The purpose of this paper is to identify firms in the UK adopting a policy of high cash and low leverage and investigate how executive ownership contributes to this decision.

Firms following this policy are identified both by using a fixed classification approach and the analysis of the distribution of cash and leverage. Logit analysis is then used to estimate the probability of adopting the policy as a function of executive ownership.

Extreme financial policies are suboptimal as firms adopting these policies tend to undershoot (overshoot) their target leverage (cash holdings) ratios. The impact of the executive ownership on the probability of adopting this policy is U-shaped, in line with the alignment–entrenchment hypothesis.

Despite the substantial presence of non-executive directors in the boards and a significant amount of shareholdings by executive directors, the firms under analysis have adopted suboptimal financial policies possibly because poorly governed or because executive ownership is the range where entrenchment is feasible.

This is the first attempt at recognising policies of high cash and low leverage as being explicitly interdependent. It is also the first study focussing on the UK, a country of interest, because ownership structure is relatively dispersed. Moreover, instead of choosing fixed threshold levels of the variable in defining the extreme financial policy, this paper proposes the analysis of the distribution of cash holdings and leverage and accounts for target levels of cash and leverage.

The aim of this paper is to investigate the dynamics between executive ownership and excess cash policy in the UK.

The authors identify firms adopting an excess policy using a joint criterion of high cash and cash higher than the target. Logit analysis is used to estimate the impact of executive ownership and other governance characteristics on the probability of adopting an excess cash policy.

The results suggest that, in the UK, the impact of the executive ownership on the probability of adopting an excess cash policy is non-monotonic, in line with the alignment-entrenchment hypothesis. The results are robust to different definitions of excess cash policy, to alternative specifications of the regression model, to different estimation frameworks and to alternative proxies of ownership concentration.

The authors’ approach provides a new measure of the excess target cash for the firm. They show the need to identify an excess target cash policy not only by using an empirical criterion and a theoretical target level of cash, but also by capturing persistence in deviation from the target cash level. The authors’ measure of excess target cash calls into questions findings from previous studies. The authors’ approach can be used to explore whether excess cash holdings of UK firms and the impact of managerial ownership have changed from before the crisis to after the crisis.

The authors’ measure of excess target cash allows identifying in practice levels of cash which are abnormal with respect to an equilibrium level. UK firms should be cautious in using executive ownership as a corporate governance mechanism, as this may generate suboptimal cash holdings and suboptimal firm value. Excess cash policy might be driven not only by a poor corporate governance system, but also by the interplay between agency costs of managerial opportunism and cost of the external finance which further research could explore.

Actually, “how much cash is too much” is a question that has not been addressed by the literature. The authors address this question. Also, this amount of cash allows the authors to study the extent to which executive ownership contributes to explain the out-of-equilibrium persistency in the cash level.

This paper aims to examine whether corporate social responsibility (CSR) is associated with firms’ earnings quality (EQ) and how this association is context-specific. The authors consider specific institutional differences in strength of corporate governance (CG) attributes, quality of law enforcement and level of investor protection found between Anglo-American, European and South-Eastern Asian CG models to test the impact of above country-level factors on this association.

To test the association between CSR and EQ, the authors consider EIRIS (Ethical Investment Research Service) (2018) CSR issues of sustainability indicators as proxy to capture CSR. Following Rezaee and Tuo’s (2019) study, the authors classify EQ into innate earnings quality (IEQ) and discretionary earnings quality (DEQ). The authors investigate the innate (discretionary) EQ as to refer to firm’s inherent operating uncertainty (earnings management). Several dependency models for panel data applying the generalized method of moment (GMM) estimator of Arellano and Bond (1991) are ruled based on archival data of 4,206 non-financial international listed firms over the period 2012-2017.

Univariate and GMM multivariate cross-country analyses show that CSR is positively associated with EQ and that this association is more pronounced for firms within countries where good CG tools and higher investor right protection are preserved. The authors interpret the findings as evidence that the CSR-EQ association is shaped by the degree of monitoring role played by institutional features at the country level. The results are robust to a battery of robustness tests.

The originality of this research is twice. On the one hand, it examines whether CSR is a reflection of manager’s ethical opportunistic behavior resultant on earnings quality derived from a firm’s innate traits. On the second hand, it tests whether CSR is a reflection of discretionary earnings quality manifested by earnings management behavior. This paper is the first to support that institutional features significantly matter when investigating the association between CSR and EQ.

This paper aims to examine the mediating effect of dividend payout on the relationship between internal governance mechanisms (board of directors and ownership structure) and the free cash flow level.

Linear regression models are used to investigate such relationships applying data from a sample of 207 non-financial firms listed on the Gulf Cooperation Council countries’ stock markets between 2009 and 2016. To test the significance of mediating effect, the author uses the Sobel test.

The author finds a partial mediation effect of dividend on the relationship between both board independence and managerial ownership and the level of free cash flow. The results confirm the major role of outside directors in corporate governance. This governance mechanism contributes to the protection of shareholders’ interests through a generous dividend policy. However, the author finds that large managerial shareholdings increase the level of free cash flow through lower dividend payouts. This result suggests that powerful managers follow their preference of retaining excess cash to their own interests.

This paper offers insights to policy-makers of emerging economies interested in the development of the corporate governance. This study provides guidance for firms in the construction and implementation of their own corporate governance policies.

The main contribution of the present paper is to examine the dividend payout as a potential mediating variable between internal governance mechanisms and free cash flow. Moreover, it highlights the issue of efficient management of substantial funds in Sharia-compliant and non-Sharia-compliant firms.

The purpose of this paper is to examine whether corporate governance has an impact on portfolio selection within the usual mean‐variance framework, the idea being that by reducing agency conflicts, corporate governance increases the value of the firm.

Using a sample of 460 American firms between 1995 and 2004, the authors first determine the optimal mean‐variance portfolio. The authors then test whether governance characteristics explain the optimal portfolio weights.

The results show that the optimal portfolio weights are sensitive to internal control mechanisms, ownership concentration, managerial entrenchment and incentive compensation.

The results are relevant to academicians and investors concerned with portfolio selection. In fact, they underline the importance of including governance characteristics in their portfolio selection.

The main purpose of the study is to examine the influence of family directors on the firm performance of public listed companies (PLCs) in Malaysia. This study provides empirical evidence on the agency problems between controlling shareholders and minority interests in the concentrated ownership setting.

Samples of the study are 112 PLCs in year 2006. Two measures of firm performance are used: return on assets (ROA) and Tobin’s Q. Managerial ownership refers to the percentage shareholdings of executive directors with direct and indirect holdings. It was further categorized into family ownership and non-family ownership.

In relation to ROA, managerial ownership is found positively significant. The results also show that the positive relationship between managerial ownership is contributed by the managerial-non-family ownership. In relation to Tobin’s Q, the results show a U-shape with turning point at 31.38% for managerial ownership and 28.29% for the managerial-family ownership. The results found significant and positive relationships between managerial ownership and both measures of firm performance which indicates that managerial ownership and family ownership yield greater efficiency.

The study highlights the effects of corporate governance on ROA and Tobin’s Q are somewhat different. It provides some evidence on the need to use appropriate measure of firm performance. The significant relationship supports the argument of Chami (1999), Fama and Jensen (1983), and DeAngelo and DeAngelo (1985) and empirical evidence of Lee (2004) that family ownership enhances monitoring activities.

Differentiating the types of managerial ownership into family and non-family categories enriches our knowledge about who actually contributes to the improved performance.

This paper attempts to examine the nature of the relationship between employee stock ownership (ESO) and value creation in the context of shareholder governance.

The research sample includes 129 French CAC All-Tradable index companies observed from 2015 to 2019. The system generalised moment (GMM) estimator (Blundell and Bond, 1998) is used in the dynamic panel.

The results estimated from the system GMM model show a threshold effect in the ESO–value creation relationship. For an employee shareholding ratio less than 3%, ESO has a positive impact on value creation; above this level, the impact becomes negative. Furthermore, the nature of the relationship largely depends on the form of employee shareholding.

These results are with strong economic implications. The risk of CEO entrenchment increases with the rise in share parts owned by employees. Companies with high shareholder value creation are companies with low employee ownership.

The main contribution in this study is that the form of ESO was considered in our analysis, which was not done in previous research. Another contribution is the use of recent data (2015–2019), which takes into account the large-scale development of French ESO practices, especially the absence of crises that may bias the results.

Previous studies employing the behavioral theory of the firm have not explicitly taken the roles of decision makers and corporate governance into consideration. The purpose of this paper is to fill in this gap by integrating CEO overconfidence and discretion into the performance feedback mechanism.

Financial data were collected from 1,730 Chinese listed companies in the period 2011–2015. Firm-level patent application data were collected for 1988–2015 to measure firm patent application rhythm. Hypothesis testing relied on the fixed effect panel data model.

There is a positive relationship between performance discrepancy and a firm’s patent application rhythm. CEO overconfidence will weaken this positive relationship. The negative moderating effect of CEO overconfidence will be less pronounced when CEO discretion is high.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this work is the first empirical study that investigates the roles of CEO overconfidence and discretion in shaping the performance feedback mechanism.