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This study aims to analyze whether family ownership and working capital management (WCM) affect firm profitability and liquidity. Further, we also investigate the moderating effect of family ownership on the association between WCM, firm profitability and liquidity.

This study uses a sample of 150 nonfinancial companies listed on the Pakistan Stock Exchange for the period 2014–2019. For empirical analysis, this study used multiple proxies of family ownership and applied robust and bootstrapped quantile regression models.

The results suggest that family ownership has a negative association with firm profitability and liquidity. Moreover, this study finds a positive association between WCM and firm profitability and liquidity. Furthermore, the results indicate that family ownership negatively moderates the association between WCM and firm profitability. In addition, we argue that family ownership rescinds the impact of WCM as excess liquidity may be used for extracting private benefits and related party transactions.

First, this study has examined the nexus between family ownership, WCM, firm profitability and liquidity in the context of a developing country, i.e. Pakistan. Second, previous studies have not analyzed the moderating role of family ownership in the association between working capital management, firm profitability and liquidity. Third, this study provides unique evidence that family-owned firms have an adverse liquidity position as compared with other firms.

This paper aims to investigate the effect of political connections on earnings quality by simultaneously controlling the firm characteristics; to test whether Pakistani firms’ ownership, specifically family ownership, plays a significant role in political connections–earnings quality association; to draw a conclusion about the agency theory in the context of Pakistan.

A quantitative approach was used to examine the influence of political connections and family ownership on the earnings quality of listed firms in Pakistan. The study uses historical data from 238 active non-financial firms listed on the Pakistan Stock Exchange during the period of 2009-2015. The final data set comprises more than 1,600 firm-year observations from ten major non-financial industry classifications. To enhance the robustness of the empirical relationship, the study used several proxies of earnings quality in conjunction with robust regression methods and diagnostic checks.

The present study’s findings are consistent with the findings of the studies on agency theory previous literature, where politically connected firms have significantly lower earnings quality as compared to non-connected firms. The results also indicate that family firms have superior earnings quality than non-family–controlled firms. Furthermore, family ownership moderates the negative influence of political connections on earnings quality. This implies that family ownership diminishes the costs of political connections and improves the earnings quality of the firm.

This study is different from previous research in three respects. First, it examines whether family ownership concentration has a moderating influence on the relationship between political connections and earnings quality. Second, it uses a robust methodology and extensive data set to examine the influence of political connections and family ownership concentration on earnings quality. Further, this study is the first to analyze the nexus between financial reporting quality and the political business environment in the context of Pakistan.

The study analyzes the influence of corporate governance and ownership concentration levels on the cost of equity. Further, the authors extend the literature by investigating the moderating effect of ownership concentration levels (i.e. at 5%, 10% and 20%) on the relationship between corporate governance and the cost of equity.

The study applies several robust panel regression techniques to a sample of 114 active non-financial companies listed on the Pakistan Stock Exchange from 2011 to 2016. Corporate governance was measured through a unique index comprising 30 governance attributes. The cost of equity was measured through the capital asset pricing model. Further, the authors construct three variables for ownership concentration levels, i.e. at 5%, 10% and 20%. To address the endogeneity problem, the one-lagged variable model and GMM approaches were also applied.

The results indicate that better corporate governance reduces the cost of equity, while ownership concentration at high thresholds would increase the cost of equity. Further, the authors find that ownership concentration at the 20% threshold moderates the relationship between corporate governance and the cost of equity. Thus, the authors argue that firms can minimize the risk faced by shareholders by implementing substantive corporate governance mechanisms. In addition, effective corporate governance mechanisms at high ownership concentration levels are imperative for managing the cost of equity.

The study reports novel evidence that ownership concentration at a high threshold moderates the effect of corporate governance on the cost of equity.

This study aims to investigate the impact of family ownership on firm performance. The authors examine whether family ownership in a firm reduces the adverse consequences of political connections on firm performance. Further, the authors analyze whether monitoring benefits of family ownership vary over family generations.

This study examines the financial data from 229 active nonfinancial firms listed on the Pakistan Stock Exchange between 2011 and 2019. First, the authors estimated several panel data regression models after incorporating control variables in the full sample. Second, the authors estimated models in the subsample of family firms for investigating whether the results vary among different generations of family firms. Further, for checking the robustness of the authors’ statistical results, the authors have used two proxies of family ownership and revalidated the findings in several subsamples of the data.

This study finds that family firms financially outperform nonfamily firms. Further, the results suggest that boards with family members tend to enhance monitoring and governance mechanisms which reduce the harmful effects of political connections. Finally, this study finds that the monitoring benefits of family ownership which reduce the adverse effects of political connections on family firm performance diminishes over generations.

First, this study provides evidence of whether the monitoring benefits of family ownership reduce the adverse effects of political connections on firm performance. Second, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, no prior study provides evidence whether first-generation family firms are superior in monitoring and ultimately reducing the negative effects of political connections.

This study investigated the influence of students' conceptions of feedback (ScoF) dimensions on academic self-efficacy (SE) and self-regulation (SRG).

The study employed the partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) approach on a sample data of 528 students from ten different universities of Karachi city.

Results indicate that active use of feedback (AUF) and enjoyment (ENJ) has a positive and significant impact on SE, while ignorance showed an adverse and significant effect on SE. Additionally, SE showed its positive and significant influence on self-regulation. However, meet expectation (MEXPT), peers’ help (PHP) and tutor comment (TC) showed a positive but insignificant impact on SE.

The study provides useful insights for academicians and policymakers to develop a comprehensive strategy for university students to improve their academic SE and self-regulation.