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The purpose of this study is to look at the effect of financial leverage on the performance of Saudi listed companies. It particularly proposes to examine the heterogeneity of this relationship depending on firm profitability and firm size.

The paper uses a sample of 120 nonfinancial companies listed on the Tadawul stock exchange during the period 2017–2020. Data is obtained from the companies’ financial reports. This study uses the system GMM and the quantile regression. The first methodology examines the effect of leverage decisions on firm performance, whereas the second one tests the heterogeneity of this relationship.

GMM results demonstrate the adverse effect of leverage on firm performance in terms of return on assets, return on equities and Tobin’s Q. Besides, quantile regression results show that this relationship is heterogeneous. Particularly, leverage seems to have a greater adverse effect on the performance of high-profitable firms than low-profitable firms. Moreover, leverage has a negative effect in larger firms, whereas the influence becomes negative in smaller ones.

This study is unique in that it approaches the capital structure issue from a different perspective, where the leverage decision is distinctly considered at various levels of firm profitability and firm size. In addition, the majority of the existing studies is carried out in developed countries. However, the results might not apply to emerging countries given the specificity of their institutional structure. In this regard, Saudi Arabia has a distinctive business climate characterized by the absence of corporate tax and an illiquid bond market.

This paper aims to understand the international practices of tax planning. International companies choose their capital structure according to differences in international taxation, in order to minimize the tax burden of the whole company group. This paper reviews the literature that deals with international tax avoidance techniques by highlighting tax planning measurements in the empirical literature. The methodology used is the narrative approach of literature review, which consists on assembling and synthesizing previously published research. The paper concludes that there are several approaches of international tax planning including transfers of revenues by geographical area, redevelopment of the company, haven and loopholes in tax legislation. Moreover, finding more precise measures of tax planning techniques would be of great value to studies in this respect.

The authors follow the guideline provided by Templier and Pare (2015) in order to select the type of the literature review to use in this paper. Accordingly, this paper employs the narrative approach of literature review, which consists on assembling and synthesizing previously published research on international tax planning. This narrative review will serve as a starting point for future investigations and research developments. The authors rely on a logic of configuration in order to analyze data. This logic consists on addressing then organizing various aspects of international practices of tax planning.

The paper concludes that there are many aspects of international tax planning that need to be covered by future researchers, especially finding more precise measures of tax planning techniques would be of great value to studies in this respect.

The literature survey reveals the following issues. First, few studies have been conducted to date. Second, several approaches remain unexplored, and studies rely only on surveys' results collected from the annual report of companies (microeconomics variables), while macroeconomic variables can better explain the phenomenon of international tax planning. In this context, studies containing proposals to estimate more accurate international companies' tax planning techniques would also be welcome. Previous literature supposes premises on this issue th:at limit the accurateness of the analysis. Particularly, empirical literature is short of the proper measurement to evaluate corporate tax avoidance. This would explain the various interpretations of research findings. Hence, finding more precise measures of tax planning techniques would be of great value to studies in this respect.

This literature survey highlights recent studies dealing with tax planning theories within the framework of corporate governance. This theoretical framework particularly specifies which key variables are the most suitable for measuring tax planning methods and highlights the need to examine how those key variables might differ and under what circumstances. In addition, it underlines limits on tax planning measurements by addressing the comparison of the empirical measurements.

The paper contributes to the literature on internal tax planning in several ways. First, this study is unique in that it constitutes the only literature review that provides a comprehensive overview of research on international tax planning. Especially, it extends previous studies by considering the specific new trend of empirical literature dealing with the techniques of international tax planning. This literature review identifies two categories of tax planning approaches including techniques related to company internal management practices and international tax planning techniques. In addition, the literature survey helps to determine various strategies used by multinationals for tax planning, through an in-depth review of the existing studies. Finally, it provides researchers with a starting point to further explore issues related to tax avoidance techniques.

This paper aims to empirically assess the impact of gender diversity and board of directors’ size on Islamic banks’ performance.

Hand-collected data set including 27 banks from 2005 to 2013 is used to investigate the effect of the above mechanisms on banks’ performance as measured by return on equities and return on assets. The study uses pooling regression, which requires estimating a single equation on different cross-sectional data. Specifically, ordinary least squares is used to estimate the model.

Obtained results suggest that the presence of women on the board of directors does not have a significant influence on banks’ performance. However, gender diversity in the management department is found to have a negative and significant impact. Besides, the findings prove that the board of directors’ size adversely affects banks’ performance.

Findings of this study will enhance a better understanding of the interrelationships between performance measures and determinants, which can improve estimations of key inputs in the decision-making process. Such deeper understanding should provide policy and decision makers with an important part of the framework needed to provide quality outcomes. In addition, the results of this study provide some beneficial insights on performance determinants to the policymakers, industry leaders and bank managers. Accordingly, those parties could enhance the profitability of Sudanese Islamic banks by improving capitalisation and assets utilisation and by improving banks operation efficiency, leverage and by reducing the size of the board of directors. Industry leaders and bank managers could also benefit from the findings on bank age, which suggest that they can learn from the experience of newly established banks, as the latter are shown to be able to use their resources to generate more profits.

Results suggest that in the future, Islamic banks should focus on how to weaken the negative performance effect of female executives’ participation. Besides, banks should work to decrease labour market discrimination and increase long-term career commitment amongst women.

After reviewing the literature, the research objective was not accounted for by the existing empirical works. Indeed, the role of gender diversity and board of directors’ size on a bank’s performance was not examined in the case of Sudanese Islamic banks.

The literature studying the effect of democratic political systems on financial development has found conflicting results. Besides, recent work has focused on the level effects of democracy on financial outcomes showing evidence of positive, negative and no direct impact. This paper aims to investigate the dynamic effects of democratic transition on financial development, namely, short run and long run effects.

The author wants to see whether financial development improves after a transition to a democratic system and, if it does, for how long. Using a panel data set of 48 events of democratic transitions, the paper relies on an event study and on the estimation of dynamic panel after controlling for other potential determinants.

The author finds that transition to a democratic system raises the development of the financial sector. Particularly, these positive effects occurred in the long run, i.e. about 5 years following the democratic transition. However, in the short run, the author finds that the move to democracy does not impact financial outcomes.

The author contributes by studying the role of political system change on financial development finding that democratic transition increases the development of the financial system. Further, the author contributes by finding that the move to democracy produces positive effect only in the long term.