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The aim of this study is to examine the agency problems that arise between retail property owners and outsourced facility management (FM) service vendors in Ghana.

This study was carried out using telephone and face-to-face interviews. Nine facility managers (n =9) and six retail property owners (n = 6) purposively selected participated in the interviews. The responses from the interviews were analysed using content analysis. To begin with the analysis, the recorded audio for each respondent during the interviews was transcribed to augment what was written during the interviews. The next step was the development of a coding framework where each of the agency problems was assigned unique codes and grouped under themes. Each response was assigned a predefined code based on the agency problems identified in the literature. The research team discussed the consistency of the thematic codes assigned to each of the responses to ensure that each response was captured under the appropriate agency problem theme it best represents.

The results showed that agency problems in FM outsourcing in the Ghanaian retail sector are related to disagreement on expenditure associated with maintenance and repairs and improper tenant information sharing and use by FM service providers. Based on the findings, it is recommended that property owners explore the mixed approach to FM to mitigate the risks of complete outsourcing of FM services. It is also recommended that a clear path on how tenant information can be shared be pre-agreed in FM contracts.

This study provides new literature relating to agency problems in outsourcing and may be the first of its kind for FM in the Ghanaian retail industry. The findings could serve as a starting point for service providers and their principals to find common grounds to understand each other and mitigate the agency problems that could arise and their overall impact on performance.

This article analyzes the moderating role of investment opportunities, business risk and agency costs in shaping the nexus between excess cash and corporate performance.

This research uses dynamic regression models (two-step system generalized method of moments) to analyze the data related to 200 Turkish companies listed on Borsa Istanbul (BIST) for the years between 2009 and 2020.

The findings indicate that when excess cash increases, the financial performance deteriorates only for firms with lower investments compared to firms with more investments. In addition, investment contributes to better financial performance for firms that hold cash surplus, whereas the influence of investment is insignificant for firms that have insufficient cash. Agency costs of equity exacerbate the adverse impact of excess cash on financial performance while agency costs of debt mitigate this effect. Excess cash reduces the financial performance of highly leveraged firms. However, this impact becomes insignificant when debt ratio decreases. The findings also show that investment has more significant role than business risk in building the precautionary motive to hold cash.

The findings of this article are limited to the Turkish market. Future research is still needed in other emerging markets to compare the results and reveal more about the effect of excess cash on firm performance, and how other factors can change this effect.

The findings verify the increased significance of excess cash in the presence of investment opportunities and difficulties in accessing external funds. Nevertheless, the role of the equity related agency problem in reducing the benefits of cash surplus confirms the necessity of policies that support corporate governance, especially in emerging markets.

This article, according to the knowledge of author, is the first to examine the role of agency costs associated with debt and equity, and the compound effect of investment opportunities and business risk on the nexus between excess internal funds and corporate financial performance in emerging markets.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the effects of managerial myopia on information technology (IT) investment. Specifically, it aims to investigate the influence of chief information officer (CIO) compensation on IT investment and the moderating role of the board monitoring strength on this relationship.

The study examines a sample of 194 firms listed on US stock exchanges with a CIO position in 2019. The authors employ hierarchical regression analysis to test the hypothesis.

The results show that CIO compensation negatively influences IT investment. Further, even though vigilant board monitoring does not necessarily reduce such opportunistic behaviors, weak board monitoring creates an environment for such actions.

First, the cross-sectional data can limit the results' generalizability. Second, the sampling frame is not perfectly random as it consists of firms that have CIO compensation information in the ExecuComp for 2019. Third, we include only two measures of board monitoring strength.

Board of directors should wisely select compensation packages' components since equity incentives potentially exacerbate managerial myopia. Moreover, firms may regulate CIOs' investment behaviors through board-level IT governance.

This study is one of the few studies that utilize CIO sensitivity to measure CIO compensation. Moreover, by examining the factors affecting IT investment behavior, this study sheds light on CIO incentives' impact on IT investment behaviors. Finally, to the best of the authors' knowledge, this is the first study to investigate board monitoring's role in the relationship between CIO sensitivity and IT investment intensity.

The phenomenon of “broken rungs” has prevented most women from attaining managerial positions relative to men. Despite this gender disparity in management, female executives are more likely to enhance shareholder trust due to higher ethical standards, which can be hypothesized to mitigate the negative impact of family ownership on firm value. Therefore, this study aims to investigate the moderating role of female ownership and female directors in mitigating the unfavorable effects of family ownership on firm value as measured by Tobin’s Q and the Market Value of Equity (MVE).

Multiple linear regression is applied to examine the proposed hypotheses, as well as other vital factors, such as board independence (BI), the dual chief executive officer (CEO)–chairman role (CEO duality) and control variables (i.e. firm size, firm age, leverage and investment ratio).

The results revealed that female directors could buffer the negative impact caused by family ownership, leading to higher firm value, when given a sufficient level of female ownership or the appointment of more female directors, regardless of female ownership levels. Otherwise, female ownership cannot help overcome the negative effects of family ownership in Thai-listed firms. This study also sheds light on corporate governance elements that impact firm value. CEO duality reduces the value of Thai-listed companies, whereas board independence increases firm value.

The managerial roles for women should be promoted in Thai-listed enterprises. The government can support new laws, policies and programs for embracing a cross-cutting gender perspective. Female network initiatives enable women to advance in their managerial careers.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study intends to fill the research gap by investigating how female directors and owners can moderate family ownership’s influence on the value of firms listed on the Stock Exchange of Thailand (SET), which is one of the emerging capital markets.

This paper aims to verify whether the integration of sustainability in executive compensation positively affects firms’ non-financial performance and whether corporate governance characteristics enhance the relationship between sustainability compensation and firms’ non-financial performance and to expand the domain of the impact of sustainability on non-financial performance.

This analysis is based on a sample of companies listed on the Milan Italian Stock Exchange from the Financial Times Milan Stock Exchange Index over the 2016–2020 period. Regression analysis was used by using data retrieved from the Refinitiv Eikon database and the sample firms’ remuneration reports.

The findings of this paper show that embedding sustainability in executive compensation positively affects firms’ non-financial performance. The results of this paper also reveal that specific corporate governance features can improve the impact of sustainability on non-financial performance.

This analysis is limited to Italian firms included in the Financial Times Milan Stock Exchange Index; however, the findings are highly significant.

The findings provide regulators with useful insights for considering the integration of sustainability goals into executive remuneration. Another implication is that policymakers should require – at least – listed firms to fulfil specific corporate governance structural requirements. Finally, the findings can provide investors and financial analysts with a greater awareness of the role played by executive remuneration in the long-term value-creation process.

This paper contributes to addressing the relationship among sustainability, remuneration and non-financial disclosure, drawing on the stakeholder–agency theoretical framework and focusing on Italian firms. This issue has received limited attention with controversial results in the literature.

This paper explores the factors that shape the complexity of company annual reports in the USA. Using a general-to-specific modeling approach, this study examines the determinants of annual reports' tone complexity.

Negative relationships were found between agency problems and tone; agency costs and readability of annual reports; profitability and tone; and ownership structure and tone complexity.

These relationships helped to confirm several of this study’s hypotheses, whereas positive associations were found between investment growth opportunities and tone complexity, which contradicts one of our initial hypotheses. Findings reveal that the more complex the language in an annual report is, the more difficult it is to strategically make a judgment or decision about the reported financial situation.

Analyzing these variables allows security analysts and investors to obtain important information, not available in the financial statements, which would enhance their understanding of the firm and improve their recommendations and investment decision-making process.

This study aims to investigate the relationship between boardroom gender diversity (BoGD) and risk-taking by property-liability (P-L) stock insurers from an analytical framework that control for organizational form and ownership structure. It relies on the behavioral agency model, the resource dependency theory and the concept of socioemotional wealth (SEW).

This study builds on an unbalanced panel of 2,285 firm-year observations from 232 European and US P-L stock insurers covering the period 2010–2019 and measure risk-taking by using four proxies: total risk (TR), upside risk (UpR), downside risk (DwR) and default risk (DR). Reverse causality and endogeneity concerns are treated by applying different approaches.

Findings suggest that BoGD mitigates the TR, DwR and DR but does not interfere with the UpR, which conceptualizes firm expectations to enhance patrimony and safeguard SEW for heirs, especially in family-owned insurers. The findings hold in various robustness checks including endogeneity and alternative specifications of BoGD and risk-taking.

This study contributes to practice by contrasting the role of female directors’ bevahior when assuming risk, which seems significantly different depending on the risk-taking specification and the organizational form. The author advises policyholders and policymakers to look at closely on BoGD and ownership structure as they affect insurance company risk-taking.

This study takes a more direct approach to highlight the BoGD’s effect on corporate risk-taking by focusing on the insurance sector which is characterized by risk and uncertainty bearing. To the best of the author’s knowledge, this is the first study to consider the full range of the stock organizational forms and the degree of family control in displaying this effect in both widely traded and closely traded insurers and to assess risk-taking from both market-based and accounting-based aspects.

This chapter presents both main arguments of dividend policy theories and their empirical evidence. According to Miller and Modigliani (1961), dividend decisions are not relevant to firm value in a perfect capital market. Nevertheless, there are several market frictions in the real world (e.g., information asymmetry, agency problems, transaction costs, firm maturity, catering incentives and taxes). Therefore, academics use them to develop theories which help them explain corporate dividend decisions. Particularly, signaling theory considers dividend payments as a signal about firms' future prospects since outside investors face information disadvantage. “Bird-in-hand” theory argues that investors prefer dividends to capital gains since the former have lower risk than the latter. Agency theory is developed from the conflict of interest between corporate managers and shareholders. Corporate managers have high incentives to restrict dividend payments. Furthermore, transaction cost theory and pecking order theory posit that firms prefer internal to external funds. This drives firms to hold more cash and pay less dividends. Life cycle theory explains dividend policy by firm maturity. Mature firms have fewer investment opportunities, and thus, they tend to pay more dividends. Catering theory states that dividend decisions are based on investors' demand. Firms pay more dividends since investors prefer dividends and assign higher value to dividend payers. Tax clientele theory argues that firms that have corporate dividend policy rely on the comparative income tax rates for dividends and capital gains. Under the tax discriminations against dividends, firms tend to restrict their dividends in order to increase their stock prices.

Motivated by lack of empirical research on sukuk (Islamic bonds) defaults and factors influencing the credit risk in sukuk industry, the study investigates the impact of corporate governance (CG) practices and corporate social sustainability (CS) disclosures on default risk of Islamic bonds in an emerging market.

In the Malaysian context the authors use generalized method of moments (GMM) to examine the mitigating effect of CG structure and CS disclosures on distance to default (DD) of sukuk issuers.

The results show that although both CG and CS have a significant and positive relationship with distance to default, the contribution of CS to augment DD is higher. Moreover, different CG variables have a varied relationship with distance to default, while the association is positive for all three pillars of CS, videlicet economic, social and environmental sustainability.

The findings of the study hold important implications for issuers, subscribers and regulators in the sukuk industry.

Limited research investigates the relationship between CG, CS and default risk of Islamic bonds. In light of this, the study attempts to fill the theoretical void in literature by examining the relationship among the underlying variables.

The board structure (BS) is pivotal in modern corporate governance (CG). This study aims to investigate BS variables (BSIZE, BIND and chief executive officer [CEO] duality) and their correlation with risk-taking behavior indicators, enriching the understanding of how CG shapes financial institutions’ (FIs) decision-making in Pakistan.

By scrutinizing data from 67 financial entities listed on the Stock Exchange of Pakistan spanning from 2011 to 2022 through panel data regression techniques, the research emphasizes that BS holds a substantial influence over the risk tendencies exhibited by these firms.

Key findings suggest that board size has a positive influence, aligned with previous CG research. Smaller boards perform better and avoid excessive risk-taking, contrasting some negative relationship claims. More independent directors are recommended to curtail risk and financial disruption. Holding both CEO and chair roles reduces risk exposure, resonating with reputational and employment risk theory. It is essential to recognize that BS’s impact on risk-taking is nuanced and context-dependent.

Policymakers, scholars, practitioners and investors working in the market for financial companies might greatly benefit from the empirical findings of this study. Imposing mandates on FIs to uphold adequate capital reserves functions as a safeguard against unforeseen losses, thereby diminishing the probability of unwarranted risk-taking.

Prior studies in this domain predominantly focus on nonfinancial sectors. In addition, existing research often explores the relationship between BS and firm risk-taking solely within the banking sector, overlooking other FIs. This study contributes by using a comprehensive data set encompassing all types of FIs, thus extending the existing literature.