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The purpose of this paper, therefore, is to amplify the imperativeness for a re-oriented regulatory approach that prioritizes constructive engagement with the regulated communities, harnessing the existing pool of savings and retention of market participation.

The paper adopts a doctrinal legal research design with data drawn from primary and secondary sources of law. The primary sources include case laws and statutes, and the secondary sources include book chapters, journal articles and other internet-sourced materials.

The paper finds that the status quo in Nigeria if left to continue would spell severe economic disaster for Nigeria’s securities administration, but a well-structured realignment of the regulations would boost the country’s securities market effectiveness.

The research’s conclusions and suggestions might only be applicable to Nigeria’s particular situation with regard to capital market development and securities regulation. Other nations or locations with distinct regulatory systems, market structures and economic situations may not be able to immediately adapt it. When extending the research results outside of the Nigerian environment, caution should be exercised. For regulatory agencies and policymakers, the research offers insightful suggestions. The analysis may pinpoint certain areas where policy changes are required to address reoccurring problems and improve the chances for a healthy capital market.

For Nigeria’s regulatory frameworks controlling securities to be strengthened, this paper would be crucial. To make sure they are in line with global best practices, this entails examining and revising current laws, rules and standards. A stronger regulatory environment may also result from the implementation of harsher enforcement procedures and consequences for noncompliance. It is also required for creating market infrastructure, fostering market integration and cooperation, facilitating access to capital, monitoring and evaluation. It would also benefit investor education and protection.

Addressing these persistent issues and potential remedies in Nigeria’s capital market development and securities regulation would have various advantageous social effects. These include improved market infrastructure, more financial inclusion, improved investment protection for investors and improved market openness and integrity. Such results will help Nigerian society as a whole by fostering economic expansion, job creation, wealth distribution and general social progress.

This paper is the original work of the authors and has not been published anywhere nor submitted to another journal for publication.

This study aims to determine experimentally factors affecting the satisfaction of retail stock investors with various investor protection regulatory measures implemented by the Government of India and Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI). Also, an effort has been made to gauge the level of satisfaction of retail equities investors with the laws and guidelines developed by the Indian Government and SEBI for their invested funds.

To accomplish the study’s goals, a well-structured questionnaire was created with the help of a literature review, and copies of it were filled by Punjabi retail equities investors with the aid of stockbrokers, i.e. intermediaries. Amritsar, Jalandhar, Ludhiana and Mohali-area intermediaries were chosen using a random selection procedure. Xerox copies of the questionnaire were given to the intermediaries, who were then asked to collect responses from their clients. Some intermediaries requested the researcher to sit in their offices to collect responses from their clients. Only 373 questionnaires out of 1,000 questionnaires that were provided had been received back. Only 328 copies were correctly filled by the equity investors. To conduct the analysis, 328 copies, which were fully completed, were used as data. The appropriate approaches, such as descriptives, factor analysis and ordinal regression analysis, were used to study the data.

With the aid of factor analysis, four factors have been identified that influence investors’ satisfaction with various investor protection regulatory measures implemented by government and SEBI regulations, including regulations addressing primary and secondary market dealings, rules for investor awareness and protection, rules to prevent company malpractices and laws for corporate governance and investor protection. The impact of these four components on investor satisfaction has been investigated using ordinal regression analysis. The pseudo-R-square statistics for the ordinal regression model demonstrated the model’s capacity for the explanation. The findings suggested that a significant amount of the overall satisfaction score about the various investor protection measures implemented by the government/SEBI has been explained by the regression model.

A study could be conducted to analyse the perspective of various stakeholders towards the disclosures made and norms followed by corporate houses. The current study may be expanded to cover the entire nation because it is only at the state level currently. It might be conceivable to examine how investments made in the retail capital market affect investors in rural areas. The influence of reforms on the functioning of stock markets could potentially be examined through another study. It could be possible to undertake a study on female investors’ knowledge about retail investment trends. The effect of digital stock trading could be examined in India. The effect of technological innovations on capital markets can be studied.

This research would be extremely useful to regulators in developing policies to protect retail equities investors. Investors are required to be safeguarded and protected to deal freely in the securities market, so they should be given more freedom in terms of investor protection measures. Stock exchanges should have the potential to bring about technological advancements in trading to protect investors from any kind of financial loss. Since the government has the power to create rules and regulations to strengthen investor protection. So, this research will be extremely useful to the government.

This work has societal ramifications. Because when adequate rules and regulations are in place to safeguard investors, they will be able to invest freely. Companies will use capital wisely and profitably. Companies should undertake tasks towards corporate social responsibility out of profits because corporate houses are part and parcel of society only.

Many investors may lack the necessary expertise to make sound financial judgments. They might not be aware of the entire risk-reward profile of various investment options. However, they must know various investor protection measures taken by the Government of India & Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) to safeguard their interests. Investors must be well-informed on the precautions to take while dealing with market intermediaries, as well as in the stock market.

Despite its potential as an emerging market for Islamic financial services, Uzbekistan has lagged in legislative support. This study aims to evaluate the feasibility of introducing an Islamic capital market (ICM) in Uzbekistan, preceding a broader industry establishment.

The authors begin by assessing Islamic finance literacy and the potential demand for ICMs in Uzbekistan. The authors then scrutinize Uzbekistan’s capital market legislation and its readiness. This analysis uses primary data, including surveys and interviews, and secondary data from literature and financial legislation.

This study highlights a significant demand for ICMs, despite low Islamic finance awareness in Uzbekistan. Presently, Uzbekistan’s capital market development is lacking, with regulations not yet suitable for ICMs. As a result, legal and operational enhancements are needed.

The authors provide essential policy recommendations for authorities and practitioners to facilitate the effective launch of ICMs and enhance Uzbekistan’s capital market stature.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study offering an in-depth analysis of the potential and feasibility of ICMs in Uzbekistan.

Stockbrokers’ frauds in India frequently occur, causing investors significant financial loss. This study aims to unfold the various dubious practices adopted by stock brokers in the recent past to defraud investors and the necessary corrective regulations passed by the market regulator to prevent and detect fraud.

The authors conduct exploratory research using a collective model of literature review, case studies and regulatory changes.

The authors find tightening the system’s loopholes and strengthening the regulatory system using technology helps in the early detection and prevention of fraud. Media activism and investors’ awareness play a role in reducing incidences of fraud.

This study unfolds the practices followed by stock brokers to defraud investors, indicative of regulatory gaps and enforcement lapses. Regulators are evolving a robust system to curb these practices and make them on par with international standards. But, it has a long way to go.

Robust fraud detection and prevention mechanism is desirable to restore investors’ confidence in the stock market. Regulators should focus on investors’ protection and education and whistleblowers’ protection. Compared to the market regulators worldwide, the Securities and Exchange Board of India has less power to identify, detect and punish fraudulent brokers and needs to be empowered.

Besides the regulatory changes, strict enforcement and investor campaigns are required to increase public awareness and restore trust in the stock market to combat the recurrence of fraud.

This paper can be helpful to regulators, investors and financial intermediaries like stock brokers and aid in strengthening the reliability of capital markets and restoring investors’ confidence.

The study examines the effect of increased Economic Policy uncertainty on analyst optimism in the Indian market. The study also explores whether the SEBI Research Analyst Regulation, 2014, has effectively contained the optimistic nature of analysts.

The study is based on firms in the Indian market. The sample period is 2003–2020. It runs a linear panel regression to measure the impact of Economic Policy uncertainty on the optimism level of analysts' forecasts and recommendations, controlling for firm fixed effects. Further, the impact of the SEBI Research Analyst Regulation, 2014, has been assessed with the help of the difference-in-difference approach.

The Economic Policy uncertainty is significantly and positively related to the analyst optimism, reflected in the forecast bias and recommendation in the Indian context. The experience of analysts and the age of the firm positively drive optimism. However, introducing the Research Analyst Regulation by SEBI led to a decline in analyst optimism. The regulation decoupled the analysts' compensation from brokerage service transactions. Thus, the results suggest that the regulation has effectively curbed the incentive to produce optimistic output.

This is the first study in the Indian market to assess the impact of uncertainty on analyst output. It also investigates the effectiveness of the first analyst-specific regulation in India, i.e. The Research Analyst Regulation, 2014.

The purpose of this paper is to scrutinise the effectiveness of four derivative exchanges’ enforcement efforts since 2007. These exchanges include the Commodity Exchange Inc. and ICE Futures US from the United States and ICE Futures Europe and the London Metal Exchange from the UK.

The paper examines 799 enforcement notices published by four exchanges through a behavioural science lens: HUMANS conceived by Hunt (2023) in Humanizing Rules: Bringing Behavioural Science to Ethics and Compliance.

The paper finds the effectiveness of the exchanges’ enforcement efforts to be a mixed picture as financial markets transition from the digital to artificial intelligence era. Humans remain a key cog in the wheel of market participants’ trading operations, albeit their roles have changed. Despite this, some elements of exchanges’ enforcement regimes have not kept pace with the move from floor to remote trading. However, in other respects, their efforts are or should be, effective, at least in behavioural terms.

The paper’s findings are arguably limited to exchanges based in Anglophone jurisdictions. The information published by the exchanges is variable, making “like-for-like” comparisons difficult in some areas.

The paper makes several recommendations that, if adopted, could help exchanges to increase the potency of their enforcement programmes.

A key aim of the paper is to shift the lens through which the debate concerning the efficacy of exchange-level oversight is conducted. Hitherto, a legal lens has been used, whereas this paper uses a behavioural lens.

Driven by the anticipated global stagflation, this straightforward yet novel study examines the cost of inflation as a macroeconomic factor by investigating its influence on stock market growth. Thus, this paper aims to examine the impact of inflation on the probability of initial public offering (IPO) withdrawal decision.

The paper employs a large dataset that covers the period January 1995–December 2019 and comprises 33,536 successful or withdrawn IPOs from 22 nations with various legal and cultural systems. This study applies a probit model utilizing version 15 of Stata statistical software.

This study finds that inflation is substantially and positively correlated with the likelihood of IPO withdrawal. Results of this study show that the IPO withdrawal decision increases up to 90% when the inflation rate climbs by 10%. Multiple robustness tests provide consistent findings.

This study's implications are important for researchers, investment banks, underwriters, issuers, regulators and stock exchanges. When processing IPO proposals, investment banks, underwriters and issuers must consider inflation projections to avoid negative effects, as demonstrated by the findings. In addition, regulators and stock exchanges must be aware of the detrimental impact of inflation on competitiveness in attracting new listings.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first to present convincing evidence of a major relationship between IPO withdrawal decision and inflation.

This study aims to examine the impact of mandatory adoption of The Act 2013 in UK on voluntary carbon disclosure. Mandatory adoption of The Act 2013 in UK is a compelling setting to examine this research question because it is an exogenous imposed event and is unlikely to be affected by disclosure choice.

This study uses a difference-in-differences research design to examine the impact of mandatory adoption of The Act 2013 in UK on voluntary carbon disclosure. The treatment sample includes 451 UK firms subject to mandatory adoption of The Act 2013, and the control sample includes firms from 15 EU countries that did not mandate adoption during the sample period.

The authors document an increase in the quantity and quality of voluntary carbon disclosure following adoption of The Act 2013 in the treatment sample relative to the control sample. They also find that firms with better environmental, social and governance (ESG) performance experience a highly significant increase in voluntary carbon disclosure after adoption of The Act 2013. For firms from carbon-intensive vs less-carbon-intensive sectors, the results suggest that firms in carbon-intensive sectors experience a greater increase in the propensity of voluntary disclosure after adoption of The Act.

The authors examine the impact of mandatory adoption of The Act 2013 in UK on voluntary carbon disclosure and the impact of firms’ ESG activity on the relationship between voluntary and mandatory carbon disclosure. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this insight has never been documented in the literature.

The purpose of this study is to provide a holistic view of the emergence of shareholder activism (SA) in India. However, specifically, this study aims at fulfilling the research gap by discussing the policy and legal advancement in the area of SA and investigating the chronological evolution of SA, manifestations of SA, motives of SA, outcome of SAs and impact of SA on the financial performance of the firm.

This study used a mixed methodology (both qualitative and quantitative) to draw inferences, including content analysis, descriptive statistics, independent sample t-test and paired sample t-test. The data has been collected from the annual reports of the sample companies and the Prowess database. Return on assets and return on equity have been used as measures of financial performance while investigating the difference in financial performance between firms subjected to SA and firms not subjected to SA.

The findings of this study suggest that there has been significant growth in the occurrence of SA incidents in India in the past decade, with shareholders prominently manifesting by opposing the proposals at annual general meetings/extraordinary general meetings, mostly involving governance-related demands. The findings from the independent sample t-tests revealed that there has been a significant difference in the financial performance of the sample subjected to SA and firms not subjected to SA. Furthermore, the results of the paired sample t-test provide strong evidence of significant improvement in the financial performance of firms’ post-SA.

The findings of this study have implications for various stakeholders. The findings of this study suggest that SA has been relatively more successful in the Indian context and may encourage minority shareholders to follow active participation through shareholder proposals and votes rather than a passive strategy to trade and exit. For firms, it can provide valuable inferences about the emergence of SA and how it has a positive impact on the financial performance of the firm, which can lead to a change in the perception of investors and promoters who perceive SA as a threat (Gillan and Starks 2000; Hartzell and Starks, 2003). For policymakers, it can act as a tool to investigate whether the regulatory changes have been able to bring the intended transparency, accountability and enhanced shareholder participation. This will encourage policymakers to be more agile, as their efforts are bearing fruit. This will also act as a guide to formulating future policies and regulations.

This study is an effort to provide a holistic view of SA scenarios in a developing economy setting like India, where SA is a very recent phenomenon. Although there are studies in the area of SA, there is a dearth of studies that have investigated the various dimensions of SA in the Indian context in a very systematic and extensive manner, investigating all the different dimensions of SA. Furthermore, this study also intends to investigate the impact of SA, which is normally perceived as a threat to financial performance and provide valuable contrasting evidence.

The purpose of this paper is to compare earnings management (EM) and capital management (CM) by European banks before and after the adoption of IFRS 9. After IFRS 9, banks have more discretion in recognizing loan-loss provisions than before IFRS 9. Hence, after IFRS 9, banks could use EM and CM to a greater extent.

This paper analyzes a sample of European banks and uses regression analysis. First, this paper examines whether EM and CM changed after IFRS 9 was adopted. Next, this study examines whether any changes in EM and CM under IFRS 9 depend on regulatory quality (RQ) in the country where banks are located.

This paper has three results. First, after IFRS 9, EM increased relative to before IFRS 9. Second, after IFRS 9, CM increased relative to before IFRS 9. Third, this increase in EM was only for banks in countries with low RQ – in countries with high RQ, this study finds no change in EM after IFRS 9. Altogether, these results suggest that, first, EM and CM increased after IFRS 9 and, second, this increase in EM depended on the RQ of a bank’s country.

This paper identifies how the adoption of IFRS 9 affected EM and CM by European banks. The main contribution of this paper is that it examines the impact of the adoption of IFRS 9 on EM and CM by European banks using data from banks’ actual financial statements.