Search results

This paper proposes a new multi-dimensional financial inclusion index.

The authors employ two-stage principal component analysis (PCA) and aggregating indicators of availability, access and use. The paper first assesses the cross-country variations in the index and analyses trends over time for a sample of countries members of the Union for the Mediterranean (UfM) from 2010–2018. Second, it investigates factors that could explain the level of financial inclusion across countries.

The financial inclusion index shows a downward trend for the full sample over the period under investigation; however when splitting the sample by income group, it appears that high- and middle–income countries did not register the same trend. When examining the determinants of financial inclusion for the UfM countries, the authors find that macroeconomic, social and governance factors, as well as banking conditions, matter. Policy-makers in low- and middle-income economies should consider the importance of digital financial inclusion, which is substituting the role to traditional banking system, to close the gap and accelerate its development.

First, the authors provide a new measure of financial inclusion using a three-dimensional index: availability, access and use, for which weights are assigned using PCA. It uses data available for the UfM sample by combining data from different databases in order to include most indicators considered in the literature, as the majority of studies only use single measures (number of bank branches, ownership of a bank account, ratio of credits or deposits to gross domestic product [GDP], etc.). Second, by focussing on UfM countries, the study covers a region that includes both large developed and small developing economies that are connected via financial and trade ties, whilst previous studies generally give global evidence from an international sample with little or no economic ties. Third, splitting the sample by country income groups, the paper presents a more comprehensive representation of the cross-country variation in financial inclusion levels between high- and middle-income economies for this region.

This paper aims to investigate the impact of cost stickiness on conditional conservatism.

The research sample consists of listed companies from 18 countries, using stock market indices of the BRICS, MIST, North Africa, USA and EU over the period ranging from 1997 to 2015. The authors use the firm-fixed effects method in the estimation of the models.

The results provide evidence of the existence of cost stickiness and conditional conservatism in the international context, using the Banker et al. (2016) model. They also argue that the conditional conservatism model (Basu, 1997) is overstated because it does not control for cost stickiness. In additional analyses, the authors conclude that the association between cost stickiness and accounting conservatism changes across country groups and across industries. The authors also document that the employee intensity and free cash-flow, as cost stickiness determinants, remain significant in the model including accounting conservatism. Moreover, the findings show that sticky cost behavior distorts inferences about standard demand drivers of conservatism such as leverage and size.

The findings are interesting and provide a better understanding of cost stickiness and conditional conservatism, and the interaction between these two phenomena in the international context, across country groups and across industries. To the best of the author’s knowledge, the study is the first one including free cash flow as a proxy for agency problem in the full model combining conservatism and cost stickiness models (Banker et al., 2016).