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Motivated by recent financial liberalization policies in emerging markets, this study investigates whether bank competition and regulatory capital affect bank risk taking in an international banking context.

Bank competition is regressed, using GLS regression, on various measures of bank risk, to reflect regulatory, accounting and market-based risk-taking. The authors use a sample of publicly traded banks operating in Africa during 2004–2019.

Results show that higher level of bank competition increases bank risk taking and results in greater financial fragility in the absence of banking capital regulations. Furthermore, larger capital adequacy ratios control the risk-taking incentives of managers and guard banks against the risk of default. Further tests confirm the significance of market-based risk measures over accounting and regulatory measures.

Findings are relevant to bank managers and regulators in their sustained effort of finding an optimal balance between bank competition and financial stability. Increased competition should be balanced with capital regulations to curtail bank excessive risky behavior and derive the social benefits of greater competition in the market while sustaining overall economic growth.

This study provides novel evidence in an international context. First, it uses regulatory, accounting and market-based measures of bank risk taking to reflect regulators', management and market participants' emphasis. Another original contribution is the investigation of bank competition across African economies characterized by financial liberalization, stringent banking system and interesting socio-economic challenges.

This paper is motivated by the heated debates preceding the introduction of additional regulatory requirements of Basel III on capital conservation buffer (CCB) and regulatory leverage (RLEV) in banks of emerging markets. The paper aims to examine which policy ratio can improve bank efficiency (BE), in one of the most resilient banking settings in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region.

The analysis is performed on a sample of 13 banks for the period 2010–2018 in Egypt and proceeds in two steps. In the first step, the data envelopment analysis model is used to derive bank-specific efficiency scores. In the second step, BE scores are regressed on the two types of regulatory capital and a set of control variables.

The paper is motivated by regulatory debates on the viability of RLEV and CCB in enhancing BE. The results show that higher RLEV and CCB are associated with a reduction in BE and that RLEV is highly associated with BE compared to CCB. Hence, results are relevant to policymakers in designing measures for improving BE in emerging markets.

The findings contribute to a small but growing stream of research on capital adequacy in emerging markets. This study provides results on the viability of risk-based vs non-risk-based capital requirements. The findings are also relevant to bank regulators in similar emerging market settings in their efforts to introduce and phase in minimum leverage requirements according to Basel III.

As the popularity of Islamic banking and financial instruments continues to rise globally, a recurring empirical question is what specifically makes consumers choose Islamic banking. This paper aims to investigate the determinants of bank type selection, especially in culturally diverse settings where the Islamic banking sector is well-established. It further examines whether consumers’ gender/religion influences their choices. One intuitive prediction is that Muslim consumers opt for Islamic banking products as “ethical” because of conviction-related reasons. However, the reality is not necessarily straightforward.

This paper uses structural equation modeling to examine data collected from a survey questionnaire of 790 respondents in an emerging market setting. Further analysis is made based on gender and religion to remove related bias.

Results suggest that overall consumer awareness significantly affects the selection of Islamic banking products. The positive effect of awareness is more significant for Muslim consumers relative to non-Muslims. Interestingly, social stimuli and bank attributes have an insignificant effect on the banking choices of both Muslims and non-Muslims.

Results suggest that Islamic banks’ marketing managers should adopt differentiated strategies for men and women, focusing on the core benefits of the service or personal interactions with consumers, respectively, along with a focus on different aspects of personal service for each gender. Awareness should be enhanced by adopting informative and effective marketing strategies to attract and retain consumers in the competitive bank environment. Islamic banks (IB) should pay attention to the religious effect without considering it as the sole variable motivating potential customers. They should design segmented and customized marketing strategies based on gender-religion market segmentation to suit different groups’ needs.

The findings fill a gap in the literature and provide Islamic bankers with insights to help design and articulate their business strategies to appeal to consumers in a multicultural context. Examining an integral part of gender and religion mitigates biased estimates due to the omission of variables. The study contributes to the existing literature on customer preferences for IB with a relatively large, new data set.

Motivated by massive bank failures during the financial crisis and the remarkable resilience of Islamic banks (IBs), this paper aims to analyze the interdependencies between asset/liability portfolio choices of IBs in emerging markets.

The authors collect data from the financial statements of IBs in the Middle East and North Africa region and Southeast Asia during the period 2002-2012. Using canonical correlation analysis, the authors investigate the degree of interdependencies between the asset/liability accounts unique to IBs and how their ALM models work at times of economic turmoil.

IBs tend to make decisions on sources of finance based on their asset portfolio choices. The interdependencies are stronger for small banks. IBs direct more of their investments to risk-mitigating instruments that share the risk with the borrower/client and are based on the purchase and sale of real goods rather than financial instruments. Additionally, banks tend to rely less on equity to finance their investments during economic boom and increase their equity holdings during economic bust.

This paper contributes to research on an under-researched, globally growing finance sector. It extends research on ALM while providing novel evidence using non-standardized asset/liability accounts unique to IBs.

The analysis of unique accounts has not been discussed in prior studies, which mainly used standardized account balances to compare Islamic and conventional banks. Moreover, the resilience of IBs and whether their ALM models are superior at times of turmoil has remained a black box. The results of this study are relevant to unravel this unanswered question.

The purpose of this paper is to show the importance of policy discussions on the role of governance in limiting excessive risk-taking at times of turmoil.

Corporate governance measures are regressed on measures of risk taking using a sample of US bank holding companies (BHCs) during 2002-2014.

Results show that BHCs with more concentrated shareholders, more managerial ownership, smaller boards, and less outside directors undertake less risky investments with respect to total assets, loans, and off-balance-sheet items. Capital adequacy effect is overpowering pushing for more risky positions. Finally, banks with good governance push for less risky positions, even with larger capital ratios, during the financial crisis period relative to the precrisis boom.

This paper extends research on the association between bank ownership structure and risk taking. It adds to prior research by examining a key feature of banks, namely, their bank-specific capital adequacy. The relevance of this study stems from recent initiatives undertaken by the Basel Committee, the Group of Thirty (G30), and bank regulators to address deficient corporate governance structures that led to bank breakdowns.

One of the innovations of this paper is the use of risk-weighted measures to proxy for risk taking in banks, using risk weights used by bank regulators to adjust for operational risk, credit risk, and market risk.

Audit rotation (AR) is a key policy initiative implemented in global jurisdictions to deal with concerns about audit quality. Auditing financial reports involves communicating attested value-relevant company information to investors, and hence audit quality plays a role in the quality of financial reporting information. This paper aims to investigate whether AR affects the degree of information asymmetry (IS) between investors. It further aims to examine whether voluntary AR results in less asymmetric information compared to mandatory AR. Additionally, it examines whether political connections moderate the association between AR and IS.

The authors use data from publicly traded banks across the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) for the period 2010–2018. The authors include several variables to control for corporate governance and other firm-specific characteristics by using country-year fixed-effects regression model.

The authors find higher IS for banks that periodically rotate auditor, while banks voluntarily choose to rotate auditors obtain high-quality audits, which results in higher trading volume and lower stock return volatility, hence lower IS. The results suggest that when banks voluntarily choose to rotate auditors, investors perceive these banks as more committed to obtaining high-quality audits relative to mandatory AR. Providing higher quality audits enhances the credibility of reported information and thus reduce the level of IS. Moreover, IS following AR is higher for politically connected banks than for similar but politically unconnected banks. Finally, investors perceive voluntary AR as a disciplining tool, which mitigates IS. This mitigating role is not affected by bank political connectedness.

This study has limitations as the definition of AR could be interpreted as binary or too narrow, and hence it may not be appropriate to generalize findings to different contexts. Nonetheless, this study casts light on a new perspective to reconcile the existing mixed evidence on the influence of AR on IS and the moderating role of political connections. A further limitation is that because of data unavailability, the authors were unable to use other proxies (e.g. bid-ask spreads and analyst forecast dispersion) of IS.

The present findings provide insight to regulators, policymakers and standard setters on the potential adverse effect of political connections on the role of AR in mitigating IS. The results underscore the importance of voluntary AR, and suggest that regulators, policymakers and standard setters encourage firms to rotate their auditors periodically.

This study provides evidence in a setting that is unique at the economic, social and regulatory levels. Prior literature is lacking and has been centered on developed countries or focusing on single-country specifications. The data set of this study is unique and allows us to examine the interplay between political influence that arises through ownership and management roles of influential members of state.

The authors investigate whether abnormal tone in corporate narrative disclosures is associated with earnings management and earnings quality, in an emerging market context. Based on agency theory and opportunistic/impression management perspective, this study examines whether executives manage disclosure tone to support their opportunistic behavior, when using earnings management.

This study uses a sample of earnings press releases of publicly traded firms in the MENA region during 2014–2019. It employs textual analysis to measure disclosure tone. The authors estimate abnormal disclosure tone after controlling for firm characteristics. Discretionary accruals proxy for earnings management and are estimated using Modified Jones model. Earnings quality is measured using accounting-based and market-based proxies: earnings smoothness, persistence, predictability and value relevance/informativeness.

Results show a positive association between abnormal disclosure tone and earnings management. Additionally, results show that earnings persistence is higher for firms with lower levels of abnormal disclosure tone. Results are sustained for earnings smoothness, but not for predictability and value relevance/informativeness.

Results provide initial evidence of management's use of tone management jointly with earnings management. This adds to prior studies adopting the opportunistic perspective of disclosure tone, through showing that discretionary tone in narrative disclosures can be strategically used by management to influence investors' perceptions.

The results provide valuable insight to board of directors, auditors and market participants on the possible biases emerging from tone of narrative disclosures in corporate reports. For regulators and standard-setters, results shed light on the need for regulations and rules beyond financial statements, to guide disclosure of narrative information in different corporate reports.

This study contributes to the rare evidence that investigates textual disclosure characteristics to uncover management's opportunistic practices and assess earnings quality. Where majority of studies concentrate on developed markets, this study provides novel evidence of emerging markets by examining the association between abnormal disclosure tone and earnings management/earnings quality. Also, it validates the tone management model proposed by Huang et al. (2014) for capturing tone manipulation.

This paper is motivated by the ongoing debate on the value relevance of cash flow statement (CFS) between bank regulators, on one hand, and accounting standard setters, on the other hand. The importance and usefulness of cash flows during economic turmoil exacerbated by the Covid-19 pandemic has recently gained attention. Hence, this paper investigates the impact of Covid-19 pandemic on the value relevance of cash flows (CF) beyond accounting earnings and book equity.

A panel of 236 bank-year observations is examined for value relevance in emerging capital markets of Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries. Using value relevance regression, operating and non-operating CF items are tested for value relevance beyond earnings and book value of equity during the periods 2018–2019 (pre-pandemic) and 2020–2021 (pandemic).

There is limited value relevance of CF beyond accounting earnings and the book value of equity. The distinction between operating and non-operating CF is not informative. However, the value relevance is significant during the pandemic, indicating that investors rely on CF for valuation purposes at times of uncertainty, corroborating further research on CF distress predictive ability.

This paper provides novel evidence on value relevance of CF and its superiority to accounting earnings and equity values during times of uncertainty. It extends a small body of research in the banking sector in emerging markets. Hence, it complements prior literature and has practical implications to accounting standard setters and bank regulators in emerging markets.

This paper aims to provide a systematic review of literature pertaining to how executive behavioral characteristics relate to financial reporting decisions.

The authors review 44 papers published between 2001 and 2021 in top journals that are nested in leading business, economic and accounting journals.

Through the systematic review, the authors provide a framework for the emergence of narcissism and how it relates to decision making and hence, firm performance. Additionally, this paper identifies different measures of measuring narcissism with their pros and cons and suggest that different measures lead to different outcomes in prior literature.

The study contributes to a growing stream of research on executives' attributes influence on decision making. The authors recommend that future research may focus more on the chief financial officer (CFO) role as the majority of literature in CEO based. Additionally, the authors suggest that different settings may moderate the outcomes, and the authors propose that future research may be conducted to show how the regulatory environment affects or moderates narcissism effect.

This paper aims to investigate the association between board gender diversity and bank risk taking in an emerging market context.

The association between female board directorship and bank risk taking is examined, while controlling for board characteristics, managerial, concentrated, family and government ownership. Two-stage regression with instrumental variables is used for a sample of banks listed in Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries during 2002-2014.

Results show that banks with more female board directors invest in less risky positions; the association is attenuated when the regulatory capital is larger, providing protection against risky investments, and female directors tend to invest less in risky asset positions in Islamic banks relative to conventional banks.

The relevance of the findings stems from the recent initiatives undertaken by the Basel Committee to address deficient corporate governance structures that lead to bank breakdowns and the diversified economy of the fast-growing GCC market, relying on banking services in the aftermath of the oil price drop.

This paper provides novel evidence on the influence of board gender diversity on bank risk taking in an emerging market context. This paper fills a gap in prior research by examining bank-specific regulatory capital adequacy and Islamic banking aspects.