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How does the internal audit function make external auditors work more efficiently at the early stage of the COVID-19 pandemic? This study examines the relationship between internal audit function, audit report lag and audit fee at the early stage of the COVID-19 pandemic.

This study uses data from all public firms listed on the Indonesia Stock Exchange from 2018 to 2019 using the difference-in-difference test technique to answer the proposed hypothesis. In addition, this study also tested the issue of endogeneity using Coarsened Exact Matching (CEM) and Two-Stage Least Square (Heckman, 1979).

This study finds that, at the early stage of the COVID-19 pandemic, a good internal audit function significantly reduced audit report lag and audit fee. These findings indicate that good corporate governance implemented through an internal audit function during the COVID-19 pandemic can give assurance to prevent and mitigate the firm's risk so that external auditors can work more efficiently. Furthermore, this study also carries out an additional analysis by subsampling the high and low technological industries. Based on the robustness test, it is revealed that the results of this study are consistent.

This study contributes to the novelty of literature in auditing studies that highlights the audit process at the early stage of the COVID-19 pandemic

This research empirically investigates the evidence of the financial development and economic growth nexus in sub-Saharan Africa from 1995 to 2022.

A series of preliminary tests are conducted before using the two-stage estimated generalized least squares and robust least squares methods for the analysis. Two indices are constructed to measure financial development: one for the banking sector indicators and another for the market-based indicators (Ustarz and Fanta, 2021).

The results indicate that the banking sector index significantly impacts the gross domestic product (GDP) per capita positively. The market sector index has a negatively significant effect on the GDP per capita. Government expenditure has a positive impact on the GDP per capita.

Policymakers in sub-Saharan Africa should improve and implement finance–growth inclusive strategies that promote financial reforms and development to efficiently impact all population sectors. Policymakers should take stringent measures to ensure that the banking sector's development is sustainable to lead economic growth. The governments should strategize and promote capital market development using favorable listing rules for companies in the stock markets. Global stock market integration should be encouraged to diversify risks, increase public awareness, raise investors' confidence level and reduce stock market impediments like high taxes and regulatory barriers.

Previous study findings on the financial development and economic growth nexus are inconclusive and debatable. This study employs the financial development index approach.

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) promotes society, reduces risk, and encourages ethical business practices. Due to its relevance, we study how CSR influences firms' sustainable development. We analyze data from 427 New York Stock Exchange (NYSE)-listed firms from 2008 to 2022. The Refinitiv environmental and social score is used to measure CSR, whereas for firms' sustainable development we rely on corporate sustainable growth rate (SGR) and market-based metrics. The analysis employs various econometric techniques, including ordinary least square, fixed effect regression, two-stage least square, generalized method of moment, and simultaneous quantile regression. The results indicate that CSR has a positive and significant effect on firms' sustainable development across all models. This relationship supports the notion that socially responsible business can contribute to long-term financial sustainability in line with “stakeholder theory”, indicating that companies should accommodate the concerns of various stakeholders, including society and the environment, to achieve sustainable development. We evaluate how the conditional distributions of SGR and firms’ value are affected by CSR, categorizing them into high, moderate, and low regimes. The quantile regression estimates indicate that the effect of CSR is more pronounced at upper quantiles, followed by moderate and low regimes. These findings underscore the importance of considering CSR in assessing the SGR and enterprises market value. We also confirm that our results are robust under range of different econometrics' methods. Finally, we enlighten current literature, and our research has useful policy implications for management and investors.

A company needs to use auditing procedures to ensure the reliability of financial statements while also providing transparency to stakeholders. The extent of risk associated with the company depends on the directors’ involvement in its daily operations. This paper aims to study the relationship between busy chief executive officers (CEOs) and audit fees.

This study uses 1,037 data samples from companies listed on the Indonesia Stock Exchange from 2010 until 2018. It adopts the ordinary least squares method to test the hypothesis. Furthermore, this study performs robustness tests, such as propensity score matching (PSM) and Heckman’s two-stage least square tests (Heckman, 1979), to address the endogeneity issues.

This study finds that the appearance of a busy CEO in a company will significantly increase the audit fee. It also concludes that a long tenure of a busy CEO will substantially weaken the positive relationship between the CEO and the audit fee. However, this study discovers that, in a company with a busy CEO, a monitoring mechanism through the independent commissioner and risk management committee will only help to maximize the firm’s practical risk evaluation a little. This result is robust because the PSM and Heckman tests display consistent results, so it is free from endogeneity issues.

This study is valuable for theoretical and practical development in Indonesia. Due to the minimum regulation about multiple positions on boards in Indonesia, the shareholders must be aware of the need to choose a board with more skill and commitment to improve the position of the company. This result also warns the C-level of the company to pay more attention to its risk-monitoring process to make it more effective and efficient.

Indonesia is one of the countries that have implemented the two-tier governance system. With the minimum regulation about multiple directorships in Indonesia, this study offers new insights into how a busy CEO will be related to the audit outcomes.

The aim of this paper is to study whether adoption of sustainability policies by firms makes their stock market performance resilient to the downside risk during the crisis period.

The paper empirically examines the relationship between environmental, social and governance (ESG) and stock market performance for Indian companies that have consistently been a part of Refinitiv Eikon ESG database. Further, the study examines whether there exist significant differences in stock market performance of high ESG and low ESG-compliant firms during crisis period. The sample was made up of 70 Indian firms studied over the period 2016–2019 defined as “normal period” as well as for the declared COVID-19 crisis period, i.e. January–March 2020, and full year 2020. The authors used multivariate panel data regression, robust least square multivariate regression, pooled OLS model and two-stage least square regression method.

The study extends the existing literature by investigating the impact of ESG performance on market value of firms during the crisis period. Based on the stakeholder and “flight to safety” theory, the authors hypothesized that ESG would have significant positive effect on the stock market performance during crisis period; however, the results provide robust evidence that in a well-specified model capturing the effect of accounting-based measures of performance, Size, Growth, Risk and Dividend yield, ESG had no explanatory power over the stock market performance of ESG-compliant firms during crisis period. Furthermore, no significant difference in stock market performance indicators between high and low ESG-compliant firms was observed during the crisis period of 1Q2020 as well as for full year 2020. On contrary, the study finds dividend yield to be statistically significant in determining stock market performance of Indian firms during crisis period. The study extends the existing literature by coining the term, “ESG irrelevance” during crisis period.

The main limitation of this study is its limited sample size because there are very few Indian firms that have secured consistent ESG rating. The study focuses on consistently rated firms to avoid the impact of “greenwashing”. Further, the study is focused on India, which limits the generalizability of our findings to other emerging countries.

To the best of our knowledge, this is among the first few studies that examines sustainability and stock market performance of Indian firms during COVID-19-led crisis period. Our findings highlight no significant difference between stock market performance of high ESG firms and low ESG firms indicating that investors who wish to create wealth by investing in ESG-compliant stocks in India can do so without worrying about the companies’ ESG rating scores.

The current study aims to achieve two targets. First, examine empirically that whether corporate managers use tax avoidance to influence short-term profitability? Second, investigate the impact of tax avoidance on the value of firms. The tax accounts provide the opportunity to influence temporary/permanent profitability but empirical studies overlooking this matter, particularly in emerging economies.

First, the authors identified unexpected fluctuations of tax avoidance and then examine whether it impacts the profitability signal and firms' value? The unbalanced panel data of 189 non-financial firms for the period 2000–2018 are used for empirical analysis. The estimation biases and results consistency are verified by using two different econometric models including generalized least square and two-stage least square

The study identifies that managers manipulate the profitability signal through tax avoidance. Tax avoidance practices help in earning management and earning smoothing to avoid negative signals in the stock market. In line with the behavioral finance view, tax avoidance has a positive impact on current stock returns because investors focus on profitability without a detailed screening of cash flows.

A limited number of studies investigate the use of tax avoidance for manipulation of the short-term earning signal. Identifying gaps and limitations in the literature, this study provides invaluable insights into tax avoidance and its association with the profitability and value of firms. The findings are important for investors, managers and policymakers in making portfolio decisions and corporate policies.

This study aims to examine the effects of product market competition (PMC) on analysts’ earnings forecast attributes, particularly forecast accuracy and dispersion. The authors also investigate whether investor protection moderates the relationship between PMC and forecast attributes.

The sample covers 49,578 firm-year observations from 38 countries. This study uses an ordinary least squares regression, a Heckman two-stage regression and an instrumental two-stage least squares regression.

This study finds that PMC is associated with higher forecast accuracy and lower dispersion. The results also show that investor protection enhances the effect of PMC on forecast accuracy and dispersion. These findings imply that countries with strong investor protection have a better information environment, as exhibited by the stronger relationship between PMC and analysts’ forecast properties.

The findings highlight the importance of strong governance mechanisms in both the country and industry environments. Policymakers, including government agencies and financial regulators, can leverage these insights to formulate regulations that promote competition, ensure investor protection and facilitate informed investment decisions.

This study advances our understanding of how PMC affects analysts’ earnings forecast attributes. In addition, it pioneers evidence of the moderating role of investor protection in the relationship between PMC and forecast attributes.

The purpose of this paper is to test if building reputation capital through environmental, social and governance (ESG) investing can mitigate the negative effect of economic policy uncertainty (EPU) on firms’ valuation.

This study uses an unbalanced panel of 591 financial firms between 2005 and 2021 from Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom (UK) and the USA. Ordinary least square method is used in the empirical tests. To alleviate a potential endogeneity problem, robustness tests are performed using the two-stage least square approach with instrumental variables.

The results of this paper show that sustainable reporting can offset the negative effect of EPU on the valuation of financial firms. Consistent with the stakeholder-based reputation-building hypothesis, sustainability performance may have an insurance-like impact on firms’ valuation during periods of high uncertainty.

According to the findings, during high policy uncertainty periods, investors accept to pay a premium for the stocks of the firms which built social capital through environmental and social investments. Accordingly, it is suggested that regulatory bodies and governments motivate firms to increase their stakeholder orientation to attain higher reputation capital.

Managers can mitigate the negative impact of policy uncertainty on the value of their firms via building social capital, which will increase financial market stability in return, and portfolio investors may use such firms for portfolio optimization decisions.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this paper is one of the first to examine the mitigating role of ESG investing on EPU and firm valuation relationships for financial firms. Thus, this study provides new insights related to the impact of ESG performance on valuation during uncertain times.

Research on the organizational ramifications of chief executive officer (CEO) greed remains scarce. This study intends to fill this gap by examining the impact of CEO greed on an important yet risky corporate strategy, corporate tax avoidance (CTA). Drawing on upper echelons theory, the authors argue that greedier CEOs tend to engage in more CTA. The relationship is weaker when CEOs experienced economic recessions in their early career and stronger when CEOs are endowed with equity ownership of their respective firms.

The authors test the hypotheses with data from US public firms from 1997 to 2008 and employ the ordinary least square regression analysis to analyze the hypothesized relationships. The authors also test the robustness of the results by performing the two-stage least square regression and propensity score matching analyses.

The findings lend broad support to all the hypotheses. The authors find that greedier CEOs tend to engage in more CTA by paying lower corporate taxes. The impact of greed on CTA is attenuated when CEOs are recession CEOs and is exacerbated when CEOs own large numbers of firm shares.

This paper contributes to the upper echelons research by investigating a novel executive personal characteristic, greed, and its negative impact on an important organizational outcome. This paper also contributes to the growing tax research that recognizes the important role executives play in shaping corporate tax strategies.

Few studies utilize insurance sector data to analyze how insurers' competitiveness affects their risk-taking decisions. To fill the research gap, this study aims to investigate the relationship between insurers’ competitiveness and risk-taking decisions.

This study employs unbalanced panel data for the US property-liability insurance companies from 2006 to 2019. Two-Stage estimation is applied to address the endogeneity issue, such as the Two-Step Generalized Method of Moments, General Two-Stage Least Square and Two-Stage Quantile Regression.

The regression analysis reveals that insurers' competitiveness in their risk-taking decisions is primarily negative. The finding suggests that insurers with low (high) competitiveness tend to take more (less) risk. This study sheds light on how insurers with low competitiveness may alter their risk preference, supporting the fundamental argument of the prospect theory, the CEO hubris argument, the risk-return theory and the risk-sensitivity theory.

The critical findings of this study provide policy implications when evaluating and drafting insurance legislation. Regulators must pay close attention to insurers' riskier decisions while insurers with low competitiveness or during periods of economic recession.

This research contributes to the literature by assessing whether insurers' competitiveness influences their risk-taking decisions. The empirical findings suggest that insurers with low competitiveness take on greater risks to gamble for survivability and boost profits to strengthen their financial standing. The evidence indicates that insurers may risk-seeking or irrational decision-making when facing a competitive disadvantage.