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The increasing number of banks in the Ghanaian banking industry has brought about intense competition in the industry. The purpose of this paper is, therefore, to examine the factors that influence retail banking customers’ loyalty intentions.

In order to validate the proposed research model, the study adopts a survey design. Data were collected from 565 customers of the top performing banks in terms of customer deposits. Data analysis employed the partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS–SEM) using SmartPLS version 3.

Results from the PLS–SEM analysis indicated that satisfaction, service quality and trust had significant effect on loyalty, with satisfaction having the most significant effect. Interestingly corporate image was found to have a significant effect on both satisfaction and trust but not on loyalty. In all, the proposed model accounted for 63.3 percent of the variation in loyalty.

The current study samples customers from only the top performing banks in Ghana. The use of cross-sectional data makes it impossible to study how customers’ perceptions change over time. Results from this study could, however, help managers of banks in designing strategies aimed at improving customer loyalty in order to consolidate their market share.

This paper adds to existing works that focus on loyalty in the retail banking sector, especially from the context of a developing economy. The study draws attention to the interrelationship among service quality, perceived value, satisfaction, image, trust and loyalty.

The purpose of this paper is to undertake a comparative examination of the media types used in projecting positioning strategies of service brands, and to establish whether there is evidence of congruence/fit between managerial decisions, adopted communications and target audience perceptions of positioning strategies of the brands. The relative congruence among intended, conveyed and perceived brand positions is an important research task. Also, how to ensure such synergy and minimize incongruence is an important research question both to theory and to practice.

Following extensive review of the literature, triangulation research method (face-to-face long interviews, survey and content analysis) characterized this study.

The findings reveal that overall parity between the three media (TV; newspaper; and pamphlets, leaflets, brochures and billboards) is evident in terms of failure to translate managerial decisions into corresponding positioning messages. The findings also show that fit or congruence between managerial decision and communicated message fails to deliver the desired message in 19 per cent of the observations. Further 23 per cent of the adopted strategies are neither present in communications nor perceived by the target audience. Irrespective of a positioning strategy being adopted or not, there is total congruence/fit between messages in newspapers and target audience’s perceptions, while the corresponding results for TV and other media are moderate. Moreover, channels for positioning offerings can be multifaceted and they do not strictly have to occur via communications. Only “brand name” positioning strategy demonstrates total fit, while “top of the range” shows high frequency of failure to translate managerial decisions into appropriate communication messages.

This paper offers useful insights into the overall differences between the three media (TV; newspaper; and pamphlets, leaflets, brochures and billboards) in the positioning of service brands. The study is a step forward in the diagnosis of the congruence/fit or coherence in the positioning activities between managers, firm practices and consumers’ perceptions. Without this knowledge, executives may encounter difficulties and challenges in their efforts at establishing, maintaining or reframing market “positions” for their offerings.

Purpose – The purpose of this chapter is to examine whether or not the Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM) reasonably describes the return generating process on the Ghanaian Stock Exchange using monthly return data of 19 individual companies listed on the Exchange during the period January 2000 to December 2009.

Methodology/approach – We follow a methodology similar to Jensen (1968) time series approach. Parameters are estimated using OLS. This study is designed to measure beta risk across different times by following the time series approach. The betas of the individual securities are estimated using time series data of the excess return version of the CAPM.

Findings – Our test results show that although market beta contributes to the variation in equity returns in Ghana, its contribution is not as significant as predicted by the CAPM, and in some cases very weak. Our results also reject the strictest form of the Sharpe–Lintner CAPM, but we found positive linear relationship between equity risk premium and market beta. Instead, our evidence uphold the Jensen (1968) and Jensen, Black, and Scholes (1972) versions of the CAPM.

Research limitations/implications – This study is limited to the single-factor CAPM. Future studies will extend the test to include both size and BE/ME fundamentals and factors relating to P/E ratio, momentum and liquidity.

Practical implications – Our results will make corporate managers to be cautious when using CAPM as a basis to determine cost of equity for investment appraisal purposes, and fund managers when evaluating asset and portfolio performance.

Originality/value – The CAPM is applied to individual securities instead of portfolios, since the model was developed using information on a single security.

This study aims to examine the effects of audit quality on earnings management and cost of equity capital (COE) considering the impact of two owner types: government ownership and foreign ownership.

The study uses a panel data set of 236 Vietnamese firms covering the period 2007 to 2017. Because the two main dependent variables of the COE capital and the absolute value of discretionary accruals receive fractional values between zero and one, the paper uses the generalised linear model (GLM) with a logit link and the binomial family in regression analyses. The paper uses numerous audit quality measures, including hiring Big 4 auditors or the industry-leading Big 4 auditor, changing from non-Big 4 auditors to Big 4 auditors or the industry-leading Big 4 auditor, and the length of Big 4 auditor tenure. Big 4 companies include KPMG, Deloitte, EY and PwC, whereas the non-big 4 are the other audit companies.

The study finds a negative relationship between audit quality and both the COE capital and income-increasing discretionary accruals. The effects of audit quality on discretionary accruals and the COE capital depend on the ownership levels of two important shareholders: the government and foreign investors. Foreign ownership is negatively associated with discretionary accruals; however, the effect is more pronounced in the sub-sample of state-owned enterprises (SOEs), the firms where the government owns 50% or more equity, than in the sub-sample of Non-SOEs.

To the best of the knowledge, no prior similar study exists that used the GLM with a logit link and the binomial family regression. Global investors may be interested in understanding how unique institutional settings and capital markets of each country impact the financial reporting quality and cost of capital. Further, policymakers of developing markets may have incentives to improve the quality of financial reporting and reduce the cost of capital which should result in attracting more foreign investments.

This paper aims to analyze and give directions for advancing research in stock market volatility highlighting its features, structural breaks and emerging developments. This study offers a platform to research the benchmark studies to know the research gap and give directions for extending future research.

The author has performed the literature review, and, reference checking as per the snowballing approach. Firstly, the author has started with outlining and simplifying the significance of the subject area, the review illustrating the various elements along with the research gaps and emphasizing the finding.

This work summarizes the studies covering the volatility, its properties and structural breaks on various aspects such as techniques applied, subareas and the markets. From the review’s analysis, no study has clarified the supremacy of any model because of the different market conditions, nature of data and methodological aspects. The outcome of this research work has delivered further magnitude to research the benchmark studies for the upcoming work on stock market volatility. This paper has also proposed the hybrid volatility models combining artificial intelligence with econometric techniques to detect noise, sudden changes and chaotic information easily.

The author has taken the research papers from the scholarly journal published in the English language only and the author may also consider other nonscholarly or other language journals.

To the best of the author’s knowledge, this research work highlights an updated and more comprehensive framework examining the properties and demonstrating the contemporary developments in the field of stock market volatility.

This study investigates the relationship between feelings of loneliness in the workplace, life satisfaction, affect, hope and expressivity among hotel employees.

The research model was tested via structural equation modeling based on the empirical data collected from hotel employees in Antalya, Turkey.

The research findings suggest that emotional deprivation and social companionship have a significant impact on life satisfaction, that life satisfaction has a significant impact on positive and negative emotions, and that positive and negative emotions have the same impact on pathways and agencies.

The research findings should assist researchers and practitioners to understand the behaviors of hotel employees in continuous interaction and relationship with individuals to motivate them while providing more effective services.