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The purpose of this paper is to find out firm, industry, and country level determinants of capital structure of Pakistani listed non-financial firms.

The authors use a fixed effects panel data model over a 39 years (1972-2010) unbalanced panel data of Pakistani non-financial listed firms to determine the factors that influence capital structure of these firms.

The authors find that Pakistani firms prefer retained earnings to finance their business projects, and debt is easily available for experienced firms. Moreover, socio-economic collusive networks, poor corporate governance mechanism along with weak legal system provide these firms an opportunity to pass on their risk to the creditors (banks).

The data set does not contain factors characterizing inter-industry heterogeneity, therefore, the authors use mean industry leverage and mean industry profitability to explore if any relationship exists between leverage of firms, and their respective industry leverage/profitability.

Pakistani non-financial firms are highly leveraged increasing their probability to face financial distress in erratic economic conditions. As such, the policy makers need to develop capital markets of Pakistan to enable a resilient corporate capital structure. Further, erratic economic conditions of Pakistan create uncertain business environment yielding short-term opportunities and to finance them Pakistani firms use short-term debt as a main financing source. The policy makers need to improve corporate governance mechanism and strengthen legal system that will go a long way to develop Pakistani capital market on sound and sustainable footing.

This is the first study that uses an extended number of variables and discovers financial behavior of firms in a bank-based economy having limited financing options, and facing erratic economic conditions.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the current trends of capital budgeting practices (analysis techniques, discount rate estimations and risk assessment methods) among Pakistani listed firms and analyze the responses conditional on firms’ demographics and executive characteristics.

An online questionnaire was sent via e-mail to top 200 non-financial firms (in terms of market capitalization) listed on Pakistan Stock Exchange.

With a response rate of 35 percent, it is concluded that the theory–practice gap is low as Pakistani listed firms are using discounted cash flow methods of capital budgeting and preferring net present value over internal rate of return. Similarly, weighted average cost of capital is estimated using target value weights, and capital asset pricing model (with extra risk factors) is used to determine the cost of equity capital. For risk assessment, sensitivity analysis and scenario analysis are the dominant approaches; however despite the theoretical superiority, the use of real options is very low. Overall, investment decision responses significantly differ across firm’s demographics and executive characteristics.

Pakistani business schools need to address the low usage of advanced methods such as modified internal rate of return and real options among Pakistani listed firms.

This is the first comprehensive study on the topic in Pakistan and have highlighted the areas of capital budgeting where Pakistani firms’ practices deviates from finance theory.

The purpose of this paper is to explain the link between national business system (NBS) and innovation decisions at the firm level by offering sequentially ordered sense-making mechanisms that enable the formation of firm-specific knowledge repositories and knowledge-processing capabilities.

This study engages in an extensive scale development effort to collect representative data about the NBS in the Pakistani setting, complemented by relevant validity and reliability tests. The overall theoretical model was tested on 214 firms by means of a structural equation modeling approach, using partial least-squares algorithms.

The results statistically supported the role of firm-level knowledge repositories (intellectual capital) and knowledge exploration and exploitation capabilities (absorptive capacity) as sequential mediators in the association of NBS and firm-level innovation. Besides, bridging networks of lateral ties among Pakistani businesses are found to be more effective than bonding networks of vertical ties in encouraging radical innovations.

This study significantly extends the literature about the NBS approach. It provides specific sense-making mechanisms (i.e. priming, triggering and editing) about how abstract institutional templates constituted at the business system level are translated into firm-level actionable sets by the help of intangible resource repositories and processes that guide knowledge exploration and exploitation.

The purpose of this study is to explain the adjustment rate made to target capital structures by listed non-financial firms in Pakistan during the courses of their life cycles and to determine what factors influence their adjustment rates.

The study used multivariate analysis to classify 39 years (1972-2010) of unbalanced panel data from listed non-financial Pakistani firms in terms of their growth, maturity and decline stages. Further, it used a fixed-effects panel data model to determine the factors that influence capital structure and adjustment rates during the life-cycle stages of firms.

The study observed a low–high–low leverage pattern during the growth, maturity and decline stages of businesses in line with tradeoff theory. Furthermore, the study observed an adjustment rate for growing firms of between 49.3-37.9 per cent, for mature firms of between 35.5-17.5 per cent and for declining firms of between 22.2-15.1 per cent toward their respective leverage targets. Furthermore, it was found that growing firms have higher leverage adjustment rates because, by having more investment opportunities, these firms can alter their capital structures easily by changing the composition of their new issues.

Erratic economic conditions in Pakistan have created an uncertain business environment. Therefore, even mature Pakistani firms remain skeptical about the sustainability of positive trends among current economic indicators. Furthermore, to avoid uncertainty, Pakistani firms grab short-term opportunities by using quickly available short-term debt as a main financing source. Government should introduce long-term policies that will stabilize the business environment and strengthen the financial, as well as the judicial, institutions of the country so that these firms may benefit from long-term investment opportunities and access more options for raising external financing. The results of this study will also help policymakers for other Asian economies where the capital markets are underdeveloped and where firms have higher leverage ratios, such as Thailand, Indonesia and Malaysia.

This is the first study in Pakistan that has used a multivariate approach to classify firms into their different life-cycle stages and to discover the leverage adjustment rates of firms during those life-cycle stages.

Numerous researchers have developed theories and studies to uncover the issues pertinent to dividend policy dynamics, but it is still one of the unresolved problems of finance. The purpose of this paper is to focus on a new dimension, i.e., financial expertise on the corporate board for explaining the dividend policy dynamics in the emerging equity markets of China and Pakistan.

The study employs static (fixed effect (FE) and random effect (RE)) and dynamic models – two-step generalized method of moments (GMM) estimation techniques by Arellano and Bond (1991) and Arellano and Bover (1995) – during the timespan from 2009 to 2014. Further, this study re-estimated FE, RE and GMM two-step estimation techniques by excluding the non-dividend-paying companies, and also employed instrumental variable regressing by using two instrumental variables – industry average financial expertise of the board and board size – as proxies for board financial expertise to control the possible endogeneity.

The study reveals that Chinese firms having more financial expertise on the board do not take dividends as a control mechanism (substitution hypothesis), while Pakistani firms support the compliment hypothesis and use dividends as a control mechanism to mitigate agency conflict to protect shareholders’ interests and keep additional funds from the manager’s opportunism. Further robustness models also confirm the presence of a significant association between dividend policy and board financial expertise in both equity markets.

This study introduces the financial expertise on a board as a determinant of dividend policy. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, no previous studies have focused on board-level financial expertise as a contributing factor toward dividend policy.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate whether capital structure affects the performance of non-financial firms in Pakistan.

Panel econometric techniques namely pooled ordinary least squares (OLS), fixed effects, and random effects were used to investigate the impact of capital structure on performance of non-financial firms listed on the Karachi Stock Exchange Pakistan during 2004-2009.

Empirical results indicate that all measures of capital structure (i.e. total debt ratio, long and short-term debt ratio) are negatively related to return on assets in all regressions. Moreover, total debt ratio and long-term debt ratio are negatively related to market-to-book ratio under the pooled OLS model, whereas these measures are positively related to market-to-book ratio under the fixed effects model. Short-term debt ratio is positively related to market-to-book ratio in all regressions, however the relationship is found insignificant. A negative relationship between capital structure and performance indicates that agency issues may lead the firms to use higher than appropriate levels of debt in their capital structure. This overleveraging may increase the lenders' influence which in turn limits the managers' ability to manage the operations effectively, hence negatively affecting the firm performance.

Empirical results indicate that capital structure has material effects on firm performance. Thus, corporate managers should consider the impact of leverage on performance before adjusting the debt levels. Moreover, lenders should tenderly inflict the debt covenants considering their impact on firm performance. Finally, investors should consider the firm's debt level before making investment decisions.

This may probably be the first study that explores the impact of capital structure on performance using the most recent data set of Pakistani firms. Moreover, this paper lays some groundwork upon which a more detailed evaluation of Pakistani firms' capital structures and their impact on performance could be based.

The purpose of this paper is to provide the latest information on mergers and acquisition (M&A) activities in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh from 2000 to 2009.

Using data available from Thomson Financial Service's Worldwide Mergers and Acquisitions database, the paper analyzed M&A transactions listed in the database that were announced between January 1, 2000 and December 31, 2009, in which the target firm or acquirer was located in India, Pakistan or Bangladesh.

M&A in India is a lot more active than that in Pakistan or Bangladesh. One unique feature of Pakistani M&A market is that it has a high ratio (more than 80 percent) for Pakistani firms buying non-Pakistani companies. In Bangladesh, non-Bangladeshi firms acquiring Bangladeshi companies accounted for more than 90 percent of all large M&A value.

The paper provides the latest information on M&A activities in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh from 2000 to 2009. Some similarities and differences among the three countries were compared and discussed.

This article illustrates how, during the COVID-19 pandemic, emerging market exporting firms can adopt differentiation strategies using composition-based capabilities, which, in turn, will enable them to strengthen their images and market shares, i.e. their strategic marketing performance in advanced markets.

This study is based on survey data obtained from 86 Pakistani firms exporting to advanced economies.

The study found that compositional collaboration capabilities positively influence the differentiation strategies and strategic marketing performance of emerging market exporting firms conducting business in advanced host markets. Furthermore, the findings indicate that differentiation strategies mediate the influence of compositional collaboration capabilities on the strategic marketing performance of these firms.

By taking a new compositional based theoretical perspective, this study examined the underexplored phenomenon of how emerging market firms can differentiate their offerings in advanced export markets in order to achieve a better strategic performance during external shocks such as the COVID-19 pandemic. Given that export growth is a strategic priority for many emerging markets, including Pakistan, due to their substantial trade deficits, this study provides important contributions from both the theoretical and practical perspectives.

This study aims to investigate the impact of family management and ownership structure, including foreign ownership and business group ownership, on corporate performance.

Using an agency perspective and a quantitative research methodology, this study examines listed firms in Pakistan from 2009 to 2018.

The results suggest that family management and concentrated leadership constrain, whereas family leadership, foreign ownership and group ownership strengthen monitoring effectiveness and corporate performance. These findings imply that the shareholder governance logic offers optimal solutions in an emerging economy, as relational governance may activate agency problems.

The findings are consistent with the relevance of relational governance mechanisms in the form of family leadership. However, the results suggest that emerging economies require a hybrid governance model to address their unique agency problems, thereby underlining context relevance in corporate governance scholarship. Furthermore, this research adopts a thick view of institutions to clarify institutional embeddedness and corporate governance contextuality in an emerging economy.

The purpose of this study is to determine and investigate the relative importance of different factors that result in profit heterogeneity at firm level.

This study uses analysis of variance (ANOVA) random effect model for a broad-based panel data of 337 listed firms for 22 years period from 1987 to 2008 to explain variation in firm profitability. Using ownership structure as a basic criterion, it develops different models to observe the impact of different independent variables on profit variation.

Profitability has a strong relationship with the firm-specific variables. This study demonstrates that for the firms operating in Pakistan, having its own peculiar macroeconomic anomalies, pervasive credit risk, poor corporate governance, and inefficient legal and regulatory framework; leverage is the dominant factor in explaining total variation in profitability and adversely affecting it. Size, liquidity, market share and age have a positive impact on profitability in all models, except domestic sectors where size and liquidity have significant negative and insignificant positive relationship, respectively. It finds an insignificant relationship of capital intensity and growth with the profitability. Further, significant but generally negligible impact of year, stable and transient industry effect is observed.

The analysis for this study is restricted to the factors extracted from the financial statements of the firms. Such a restriction may exclude some strategic and macroeconomic factors that may affect firm profitability and consequently may reduce explanatory power of the models. It is, however, necessary for two reasons: first, restricting the analysis to financial statements only will keep the focus endogenous; and second, the non-availability of consistent data for variables of a so-called all inclusive model.

These findings have strong policy implications both for the firms and the economic managers of Pakistan. The owners and managers of the firms operating in countries like Pakistan should consider both the capital structure and liquidity level to achieve higher profitability. The policy makers should improve the regulatory framework of corporate as well as banking sectors of Pakistan not only to help improve corporate profitability but also to ensure development of capital market in Pakistan.

This is probably first study of its kind that tries to explain variation in firm profitability in Pakistani context using a broad-based panel data.