Search results

The empirical study aims to examine the impact of board diversity with respect to gender and nationality on firm performance in an emerging economy. This research further splits the sample into family and non-family domains and investigates the diversity–performance nexus in isolation.

The sample consists of 183 listed companies in Bangladesh over the period 2007 to 2017. This study employed the generalised method of moments (GMM) technique to address the possible endogeneity issue in the governance–performance connection. To underscore the strength of diversity, three distinctive assessment measures were used: percentage representation of females and foreign directors, the Blau index and the Shannon index.

The results for the full sample models reveal that board heterogeneity regarding both female and foreign directors positively and significantly influences firm performance as measured by return on assets (ROA). Further to this, female directors in family-owned businesses have a positive association with profitability, whereas foreign nationals demonstrate a significant positive association with performance in non-family firms. Additionally, at least three women directors are needed to make a positive difference in profitability; however, a sole director with foreign nationality is capable of demonstrating a similar impact on performance.

The findings are significant for policymakers and organisations that advocate diversity on corporate boards of directors, and the minimum number of diverse board members needs to be considered depending on the identity to bring about a significant change in organisational outcome. Therefore, the findings of this study may be applied to other emerging economies with similar institutional characteristics.

This study reinforces the existing stock of knowledge on the impact of board diversity on the profitability of firms, especially in the context of an emerging economy – Bangladesh. Irrespective of the given backdrop, this study finds that both gender and nationality diversity in the case of Bangladesh is found to have a positive and significant effect on financial performance with respect to all the diversity metrics, i.e. the proportionate number of female and foreign directors on the boards, the Blau index and the Shannon index.

This paper aims to examine the impact of the Brexit referendum on the risk structure of financial asset prices. Co-movements are analysed using daily price returns of major stock and bond indices as well as commodities and exchange rates from June 2014 to June 2018. The authors used a multivariate GARCH model to study the dynamics of the conditional correlation matrix of asset returns. It was found that the conditional variances and correlations of assets spike on and after the Brexit referendum and then quickly revert to normal levels, suggesting that the effect of the referendum was transient rather than structural. The findings are of interest to investors as co-movements of financial assets can significantly impact financial portfolios and hedging strategies.

The authors used a multivariate GARCH model to study the dynamics of the conditional correlation matrix of asset returns.

It was found that the conditional variances and correlations of assets spike on and after the Brexit referendum and then quickly revert to normal levels, suggesting that the effect of the referendum was transient rather than structural.

The findings are of interest to investors as co-movements of financial assets can significantly impact financial portfolios and hedging strategies.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, research studying the underlying asset co-movements around Brexit does not exist.

This paper investigates the corruption-growth relationship in a sample of 146 countries for the period – 1984-2009. While negative effects of corruption on growth have drawn economists’ interest in recent years, our main contribution is to examine the effects by employing the hierarchical polynomial regression to evaluate the relationship after controlling economic and institutional factors.

The results are estimated using panel generalized methods of moments.

The results challenge some of the findings that negative growth-corruption association in the literature but also provide some new inferences. The findings reflect that corruption is not always growth-inhibitory; for some countries it is growth-enhancing, which supports the “greasing-the-wheels” hypothesis.

The paper investigates the growth-corruption relationship using panel generalised methods of moments. Our results suggest that a cubic function best fitted the data. The finding suggests that in the medium corrupt countries corruption stimulates growth by reducing red-tape.