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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.

Operating procedure synthesis (OPS) has been used to generate plant operating procedures for chemical plants. However, the application of AI planning to this domain has been rarely considered, and when it has the scope of the system used has limited it to solving “toy” problems. This paper describes the application of state‐of‐the‐art AI planning techniques to the generation of operating procedures for chemical plant as part of the INT‐OP project at the Universities of Salford and Loughborough. The CEP planner is outlined and its application to a double effect evaporator test rig is discussed in detail. Particular attention is paid to the issues involved in domain modelling, requiring the description of the domain, development of AI planning operators, the definition of safety restrictions, and the definition of the problem. There is then a presentation of the results, lessons learned and problems still remaining.

Grounded in lemon market theory, this paper aims to examine the influence of corporate governance (CG) on stock market liquidity in Bangladesh, where stock market manipulation because of speculative trading is a common concern.

This study is based on a sample of 2,420 firm-year observations covering all non-financial firms in Bangladesh from 1996 to 2011.

This study’s results show a significant relationship between governance and liquidity within firms over time. In particular, within firms, when governance quality increases, liquidity significantly improves. For instance, a rise in the governance quality by one standard deviation decreases the illiquidity ratio by 55.97%. The results are unlikely to be confounded by endogeneity.

The results have important policy implications for security regulators, investors, traders and managers. The results support the current regulatory trend of strengthening CG practices in the listed firms in Bangladesh.

This study contributes to the understanding of the role of effective firm-level CG on stock liquidity in the context of an emerging country. Consistent with prior research mostly conducted in the advanced economies, it provides further empirical support that higher CG quality reduces the information asymmetry problem and enhances stock liquidity even in a speculative market.

Scheduling needs to be concise and well‐determined but able to respond to the ever‐changing and uncertain market or environment against the constraints of production capacity, resources, time frame, etc. The purpose of this paper is to model and solve a scheduling problem with another domain perspective that adopts the concept of agent, and an agent‐based scheduling environment is proposed for solving the scheduling problem, in which three agents are developed, i.e. a sales agent, a scheduling agent, and a production agent.

The modeling and development of the proposed agent‐based scheduling environment and its agents under constraints are discussed. Constraint priority scheduling concepts are applied to the environment and its agents, and the feature of responding to customer change orders is included in the model. The proposed agent‐based scheduling environment with three agents is applied to a lamp‐manufacturing company in China as a case study, and the integrated agent‐based approach is also illustrated in the case study.

Throughout the autonomous communication between agents in the proposed model, a constraint‐prioritized schedule is generated to fulfill customer orders and customer change orders, as well as to achieve a better scheduling performance result. From the simulation results and analysis in the case study, satisfactory results show that the proposed model can generate a constraint‐prioritized schedule for the studied company that can completely fulfill customer orders, adjust and fulfill customer change orders, and achieve a better scheduling result.

In this paper, the scheduling problem is modeled and solved by using the domain perspective of agent‐based approach. By using an agent‐based approach, the agents can be implemented to represent manufacturing resources or aggregations of resources. Under the proposed modeling approach, the collaboration across the entire scheduling activities can be enhanced, and the efficiency and effectiveness in the scheduling activities can also be increased.

Gives reports and surveys of selected current research and developments in systems and cybernetics. They include: A calculus of ethics for a systemic world, Biocybernetics, Neuroscience, Neural technology, Computational model for chocolate, Safety‐critical systems (SCSs), Scientific and technical information from Russia, Cybernetics and systems control, Automation and cybernetics, UK science research.

The paper aims at providing a survey of the development of empirical research in business process management (BPM). It seeks to study trends in empirical BPM research and applied methodologies by means of a developed framework in order to identify the status quo and to assess the probable future development of the research field.

In order to analyse the development of the research field a systematic literature review of empirical journal articles in the BPM context is conducted. The retrieved literature is analyzed by means of scientometric methods and a developed reference framework.

The steadily growing number of published articles in empirical BPM research shows an increase in interest in the research field. Research interests, applied methodologies, the underlying research paradigm and the level of maturity of empirical BPM research differ depending on regional aspects. BPM gains importance in the industry as well as in the public administration context.

The findings are based on a sample of 355 articles and not on an exhaustive amount of available empirical research contributions. Nevertheless, significant analyses can be conducted. Future research could apply the developed reference framework for further literature reviews in order to be able to compare the findings and to measure progress.

The presented literature review gives an overview of trends in empirical BPM research. The developed and strictly applied reference framework supports a systematic analysis of contributions and can thus draw a significant picture of the state‐of‐the‐art of the research field. To the best knowledge of the authors no such survey has currently been undertaken.

This study aims to investigate the moderating effect of external financing needs on the relationship between the disclosure level of integrated reporting (IR) and firm value using evidence from Egypt.

This study uses a panel regression analysis for a matched sample of 50 companies listed on the Egyptian Stock Exchange (EGX), specifically from EGX100. The sample covers four years (2017–2020). The current study uses content analysis to measure IR and Tobin’s Q as a proxy for firm value.

The findings reveal a significant positive relationship between the disclosure level of IR and firm value. In addition, the authors find that external financing needs moderate the relationship between IR and firm value. It is concluded that the higher the disclosure level of IR content, the higher the firm’s value, and that this relationship strengthens in firms with high needs for external financing.

Several practical implications can be derived from the results of the current study. Policymakers and regulators can impose mandatory requirements for IR in Egypt. It also opens new insights for board members, managers, analysts and auditors in forming financing decisions based on annual reports.

The present study has a novel insight from a developing country and significant contributions to the extant literature. The study provides empirical evidence from an emerging economy and an insight into how external financing can be used for firms with different levels of IR. It also provides a comprehensive disclosure index to estimate the level of IR.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the effect of external financing needs on both firm value and corporate governance mechanisms within the UK SME context. This framework is of importance because of the limited external financial resources SMEs might face.

The authors consider the endogeneity problem between corporate governance mechanisms and firm value, and hence, the three stages least squares and the instrumental variables based on two stages least squares estimation methods are employed.

The authors find a positive relationship between external financing needs and firm value. In addition, the authors detect that size and profitability are positively associated with firm value in the sample. Concerning the corporate governance index (CGI), the authors detect that big SMEs and those with low-debt levels have better corporate governance structures.

The authors employ a CGI for the sample which is constructed using ten corporate governance variables. The authors also examine different factors that affect SMEs 2019 governance by applying different models including logistic analysis.

The quality of financial reporting for the financial institutions is vital for the public, as the negative consequences of manipulated financial statements will not only affect shareholders but also the regulators’ reputation and the society at large. The purpose of this paper is to assess the association between different corporate governance mechanisms and their impact on audit and reporting quality. The gender factor is introduced from a diverse boards’ perspective to highlight any impact of female presence on the quality of financial statements.

The authors examine a sample of financial institutions listed on the FTSE-350 index for the years 2011 to 2015. The financial sector has its own and different regulations, and financial reporting framework and auditors are expected to behave into more scrutiny. Bloomberg database is used to obtain governance and financial data, while firms’ annual reports are used to collect audit fees and audit committee information. A panel data regression is used to test hypotheses. The authors also control for unobservable heterogeneity, reverse causality and endogeneity.

The results suggest that boards with larger size and higher independence pay higher audit fees to enhance the monitoring capacity and protect the wider group of stakeholders. The results also show that women on boards are likely to reduce the risk of manipulated financial statements, as women are more inclined toward truthfulness, cautiousness and conservatism. In addition, the reported results show that audit committees with more independent members are more inclined toward obtaining higher quality audit to enhance firm’s reporting quality.

Given the recent governments’ intervention to avoid financial institutions’ negative impact on the economy, this study is relevant and provide policymakers insights into the existing relationships between audit fees and financial institutions’ governance structure.

The purpose of the paper is to explore the long-run impact of board governance and bank performance on executive remuneration. More specifically, the study addresses two objectives. First, the authors investigate the long-run relationship between pay and performance hold for the Indian banking industry. Second, the authors explore the moderating role of the board in explaining the relationship between executive pay and performance.

The study uses multivariate panel co-integration approaches, i.e. fully modified and dynamic ordinary least square, to explain the co-integrating relationship between executive pay, governance and performance of Indian banks. The analysis is conducted for the period from 2005 to 2018.

The results of co-integration tests reveal a long-run relationship between executive pay, board governance and bank performance. The long-run estimates produce evidence in favour of the dynamic agency theory, suggesting that the implications of asymmetric information can be mitigated by associating the current executive pay with the bank performance in the previous periods. The finding of this study reveals that improvements in the board quality serve as a monitoring tool to constrain excessive pay and moderate the executives’ pay. Furthermore, the interaction of performance and board governance negatively impacts pay, supporting a substitution approach. It implies that setting optimal pay packages for executives necessitates enhanced and efficient board governance practices.

The study recommends significant policy implications for regulators and the board of directors that executive pay significantly responds to the bank’s performance and good board governance practices in the long run.

This paper provides novel evidence of long-run pay-performance-governance relation using a panel co-integration approach.