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The purpose of this paper is to examine the relationship between intellectual capital (IC) and profitability of insurance companies in Ghana.

Data on 36 life and non-life insurance companies from 2007 to 2011 are employed to estimate the value added intellectual coefficient of Pulic (2004, 2008). Using return on assets and underwriting profit as indicators of profitability, the ordinary least squares panel corrected standard errors of Beck and Katz (2005) is used in estimating the relationship in the presence of serial correlation and heteroskedasticity. Leverage, underwriting risk and insurers’ size are used as control variables.

Non-life insurers have high IC performance comparative to life insurers. This study finds a significant positive relationship between IC and profitability of insurers in Ghana while human capital efficiency is the main driver of insurers’ IC performance.

The study discusses relevance of IC for management of insurance companies in Ghana and other emerging insurance markets in Africa.

This appears to be the first study to examine the impact of IC on profitability of a developing insurance market in Africa.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the bank-specific and macroeconomic determinants of nonperforming loans (NPLs) as well as the impact of NPLs on bank profitability.

Using a sample of 22 Ghanaian banks over the period 2005-2010, the study employs a fixed effect panel model in estimating three different empirical models.

The study finds new evidence of bank-specific factors as well as macroeconomic factors determining NPLs. Inflation and industry concentration are not significant in determining NPLs, although both are positively related to NPLs.

The findings of this study have important implications for policy makers and bank managers.

The paper offers significant value in shaping and improving the banking sector of emerging markets.

The purpose of the study is to examine the influence of corporate governance on the flow of firm-specific information in an emerging market.

Synchronicity is estimated under assumptions of contemporaneous and non-contemporaneous relationship between individual stock returns and the market return. Possible thin-trading effect is also corrected using the Dimson’s Beta approach to estimate synchronicity. In the main empirical model, both the Panel-Corrected Standard Errors and the Generalized Least Square estimations were used to provided robust evidence of governance influencing transparency.

Corporate governance was found to broadly influence the release of firm-specific information in a relatively opaque market through the information environment. However, no evidence in support of the “auditor-reputation effects” theory was found. As well, CEO duality does not create an individual powerful enough to reduce the monitoring role of boards. We further document the presence of noise trading on the Ghana Stock Exchange.

This study suggests that specific corporate mechanism practices have implications for stock selection in a relatively high information asymmetry Capital Market. Investors require transparency; hence, firms with governance mechanisms that elicit such transparency are likely to attract investors.

This study is the first to examine the relationship between governance and transparency while using stock return synchronicity as a proxy for transparency in an emerging Ghanaian Capital Market.