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The purpose of this paper is twofold to examine the factors that contribute to local bias of venture capital in China and to explore the relationship between local bias and performance of venture capital institutions.

Local bias was measured in line with the model developed by Cumming and Dai (2010). Regression techniques were performed for our long-term cross-sectional data to analyse the potential determinants of local bias. This is followed by the Probit model to test the relationship between local preference and successful exit.

The overall finding indicated that local bias in China increased over time. The stiff competition among venture capital institutions reduced local bias, but the enhanced innovation capabilities of a particular geographical area amplified local bias because of the knowledge spillover effect. Finally, the results suggested that venture capital institutions with less local bias enjoy a greater likelihood of making successful exits.

This study used successful venture capital exit as a proxy for venture capital institution’s performance because of the unavailability of information such as internal rate of return. Future research should try to adopt other way of measuring venture capital institution’s performance.

This study sheds light on the various possible causes of local bias that the policymakers need to be aware of. Despite the rapid rise of China’s venture capital market in recent years, venture capital institutions have yet to make inroads into the local high-tech industry. This study implies to the policymakers that to reverse this trend, they should formulate policies that foster the long-term performance of venture capital institutions, mitigate the severity of local bias and raise the competitiveness of the Chinese venture capital market.

Because of data limitations, there is currently lack of prior empirical research on local bias of Chinese venture capital institutions based on large-scale data. This study intends to fill the gap.

The study intends to shed lights on whether the risk factors disclosed in the initial public offering (IPO) prospectus in Malaysia are able to reflect the actual risks of stocks once they are traded on the exchange. In other words, the purpose of this paper is to explore whether prospective investors will be able to benefit, in terms of the more accurate risk information, from the risk disclosures in the IPO-prospectus.

Using data obtained from 118 IPO prospectuses of Malaysian companies that issued shares on Bursa Malaysia in the period from 2009 to 2016, the authors investigated whether the “risk factor” section in the IPO prospectuses provides sufficient risk-relevant information to investors. To determine whether companies disclose risk-relevant information, a detailed content analysis of the risk sections was carried out to obtain an aggregate measure of risk disclosure.

The findings revealed that the aggregate measures of risk extracted from these texts did not successfully predict the following outcomes: the volatility of companies’ future stock prices, the sensitivity of future stock prices to market-wide fluctuations and the severe declines in future stock prices.

As indicated by the findings, the authors, therefore, deduce that the IPO prospectuses of Malaysian companies do not provide sufficient risk-relevant information in the risk factor section. The findings imply that overall the management of Malaysian companies would neither be able nor willing to disclose the right and relevant information to the public via IPO prospectus.

Many corporate risk disclosure studies focus primarily on the disclosures of annual reports of companies. The study intends to fill the gap by focusing on the risk disclosure in the IPO-prospectus. Risk disclosures in IPO-prospectus are farmore extensive than annual reports and, therefore, provide a richness of information that will not be available in the annual reports.

As investors' expectations shift toward corporate sustainability, many corporations have jumped on the bandwagon of being “green” by issuing green bonds. However, as a recent green financing tool, little attention has been paid on the value that green bonds actually deliver. This causes the problem of greenwashing, in which firms pretend to be environmentally responsible when in reality they are not. This study therefore aims to explore green bonds' impact on issuers' corporate environmental and financial performance.

The sample is collected from among the green bond and conventional bond issues between 2015 and 2019 issued by corporations from various countries. Using the propensity score matching (PSM) and then difference-in-difference (DiD) approaches, two sub-groups (green bond and conventional bond issuers) were generated for comparison. Changes in environmental and financial performance over time between the sub-groups are then examined.

The overall results show that green bonds are effective in improving environmental performance, but only when they are certified by third parties. Additionally, green bonds do not have an impact on financial performance. The findings imply that green bonds' dependency on external certification may be a consequence of an underdeveloped green bond market, where weak governance still dominates the green bond market. Because of this, corporations tend to take advantage of green finance's growing popularity, causing the greenwashing problem.

Green bonds are an extremely new area of research. Few research studies focus on the effectiveness of green bonds in impacting corporate financial and environmental performance. Therefore, this study strives to fill this research gap. It sheds light on the effectiveness of green bonds in supporting the development of green projects and provides a reference point for decision-making in strengthening transparency and accountability in environmental disclosure and helps regulating authorities develop tighter regulatory controls.

The purpose of this paper is to provide an exploration on how important are “other block-holders” in explaining the performance of family-controlled corporations in Malaysia. Three important groups of block-holders are identified for the purpose, namely the “foreign institutional investors”, the “domestic institutional investors” and the “government”.

The sample was drawn based on the companies listed on the Main Board of Bursa Malaysia. All the relevant block-holders’ ownership data are hand-collected from the annual reports published by the listed corporations and descriptive statistics together with regression analysis are employed.

Overall it is found that the presence of a second block-holder in family-controlled corporations leads to better performance compared to the corporations where the controlling families act as the sole block-holder. Moreover, this study finds that the identity of the block-holders with the extent of their ownership is important in explaining the performance. Specifically, “foreign institutional investors” and “government” are found to be significant in terms of the extent of their equity holdings and the performance of these corporations, respectively. Conversely, no such relationship is found in the equity holdings of “domestic institutional investors” and the corporation performance. Such finding may imply the possible limited ability and constraints faced by the “domestic institutional investors” in Malaysia to exert effective monitoring and pressure on the management for enhanced corporation performance.

Many studies researched the influence of family ownership on the performance of family-controlled corporations but there are limited studies conducted on the influence of “other block-holders” in affecting the performance of these corporations. This paper is an attempt to provide an initial exploration on how important are these “other block-holders” in explaining the performance of these corporations in the context of a small emerging economy, Malaysia.