Int. J. Financial Stud., Volume 8, Issue 1 (March 2020) – 18 articles

This paper investigates the determinants of dividend policy in Tanzania. The study employed a panel data of non-financial firms listed on the Dar es Salaam Stock Exchange (DSE) for the period 2008–2017. The paper reports profitability, liquidity, firm size, leverage, firm growth, previous dividend, and GDP as the major determinants of corporate dividend policy. According to the results, leverage, firm growth, and GDP are negatively related to dividend payout ratio while firm size, profitability, liquidity, and lagged dividend are positively related to dividend policy. More specifically, large-sized firms, highly profitable firms, and firms who paid dividend in previous years are more likely to consider paying dividend. However, payment of dividend will all depend on whether the firm is liquid enough to afford that. On the other hand, high-growth and leveraged firms would not probably consider paying dividend, and will, therefore, opt saving money to finance their expansion and honor their debt obligations. Following these results, corporate managers are advised to consider preferences of investors towards developing corporate dividend policy; to strive paying dividend whenever economically viable (as it signals the firm’s reputation), and to limit excessive borrowing to protect firms from getting into financial meltdown (although borrowing is considered a control tool for agency-related problems). Full article

Many kinds of research has suggested that innovation is positively linked to business performance and that it acts as an intermediary between organizational variables and financial performance measured by earnings achieved. Researchers worldwide have paid great attention to identifying and exploiting the main drivers of innovation management, which has led to many research articles that have adopted different approaches and identified several factors that are related to innovation. Nevertheless, there is some ambiguity about the critical behavioral factors for innovation. Therefore, this study aims to identify behavioral incentives, or key factors, that impact business innovation and financial stability, mainly in the field of strategic management, and to reveal the latest trend in corporate innovation policy by using bibliographic mapping. The purpose is to precisely define specific incentives that can influence the overall productivity and profitability of a business, and this list of innovation factors can be of benefit to a strategic manager in introducing or supporting innovative activities. The analysis is preceded by an in-depth study of publications from the Web of Science and Scopus databases and based on the VOS Viewer method (which is a mapping and clustering program for network data), the available keywords are analyzed, and then a list of incentives in strategic innovation is compiled. Full article

The financial services sector, particularly with respect to today’s banking industry, is aiming to make a digital transition. Sustainable reporting is a holistic new reporting approach in banking and has only become partially mandatory for the sector. Thus, this paper makes a contribution to the current analysis approach and further development of the German Sustainability Code as well as associated legal approaches. It concerns the assessment of mandatory sustainable reporting in the light of constantly changing market conditions and stricter legal requirements for stakeholder data responsibility. In specific, it focuses on a digital evolving business environment and is intended to provide an insight into the perception of the topic of digitalization in the banking sector. The assessment is based on the structure of the German Sustainability Code. Based on 113 bank reports, a multiple regression analysis of 1410 codings of the keyword ‘digital’ is carried out. The results show that banks partly and not fully address digital issues in their reporting. It transpires that the emphasis is on seven criteria, while social elements are totally ignored. The paper shows a structural inequality within sustainable bank reporting with regard to digitalization. It also shows that issues are not adequately addressed and covered in legal reporting standards and that the provision of information to stakeholders on specific issues is largely undefined. Full article

Background: Online lending has developed rapidly in China in recent years, into a typical Internet financial model. China’s online lending related issues have received widespread attention from scholars. Methods: This study used 396,634 order data-points (935,037 original order data-points) from the Renren Loan website since its inception in January 2017. We used ordinary least squares (OLS) regression to study the problem of geographical discrimination in online lending in China, and we conducted two robust tests. Results: Studies have shown that significant geographical discrimination exists in China’s online lending market. From the perspective of the lender, different investment intentions exist for borrowers from various regions, thereby leading to variations in the success rates of loans. From the perspective of the borrower, the belief exists that borrowers from different regions will have varying interest rates because of the effect of geographical discrimination. Conclusion: We believe that geographical discrimination is due to the effects of the economic, financial, educational, and ethnic conditions of the borrower’s location on willingness to invest and the success rate of borrowing. However, borrowers’ self-discrimination is primarily related to economic and ethnic differences among provinces. Full article

We consider the portfolio choice of a government with a Sovereign Wealth Fund (SWF) when government revenues depend on exhaustible resources, such as oil and gas. The question is whether the SWF portfolio should underweight shares in the resource industry. Some studies have found that these share prices correlate more closely with the overall stock market than the resource price, which would seem to weaken the case for underweighting. However, equity price movements depend not only on changes in expectations of future cash flows, but also on time variation in discount factors. We analyze cash flows directly, rather than trying to disentangle these effects. We have collected cash-flow data for the companies in all of the major industries of the FTSE Global All Cap index, the basis for the strategic index of the Norwegian Government Pension Fund Global. Subsequently, we look at the correlations between each industry’s cash flow and the Norwegian government’s cash flow from oil and gas. We find a close, statistically significant, and persistent correlation for the oil and gas industry. The correlations for other industries are small and mostly insignificant. We believe that our findings can be used to support proposals for SWFs in countries with significant petroleum revenues to underweight shares in this industry. Full article

The effect of stock liquidity on stock returns is well documented in the developed capital markets, while similar studies on emerging markets are still scarce and their results ambiguous. This paper aims to analyze the state-dependent variance of liquidity premium in the Polish stock market. The Polish capital market may serve as a benchmark for other emerging markets in the region of Central and Eastern Europe, hence the results of this research should be of great interest for investors and policy makers in Poland and other post-communist European countries. In the empirical, study a unique empirical methodology has been applied, which guarantees the uniqueness of the results obtained. The results obtained suggest that on the Polish stock market exists stock liquidity premium, which is statistically significant, but constitutes only a small fraction of returns. It also does not increase during periods of bearish market, what results from the lengthening of average holding period when market liquidity decreases. Full article

This paper investigates the relationship between dividend payout and institutional ownership for all Australian listed firms in the period between 2001 and 2015. In our univariate tests, we find that institutional investors, in general, prefer dividend-paying firms more than non-paying firms, and for the dividend-paying firms in our sample, institutional investors hold more shares in the firms who pay higher dividends. We further explore the causality between dividend payout and institutional ownership in our multivariate tests with our panel data. The results show an insignificant effect of institutional ownership (dividend payout) on the future dividend payout (institutional ownership) while controlling for firms’ fundamentals, that a higher dividend yield does not attract more institutional investors and that there is no catering to Australian institutional investors. Full article

Using data from the 2018 Vietnam Household Living Standard Survey, our study investigates the impact of education on household income in rural Vietnam. Both mean and quantile regression analyses were employed to analyze the impact of education. We found that education has a positive effect on the household income after controlling for various factors in the models. However, quantile regression analysis reveals that the effect of schooling years increases with quantiles, suggesting that education bring higher returns for richer households. We also found that households with the heads having higher qualifications or vocational education tend to earn higher income levels. Combined together, these findings imply that while education was found to increase household income, it increases income inequality in rural Vietnam. Our research findings suggest that improving the access of poor households to better education is expected to increase their income and reduce inequality in rural Vietnam. Full article

Market competition drives organizations to higher efficiency. This paper analyses the relationship between the prevailing organization’s market orientation and marketing innovation activities. The sample of organizations consists of business enterprises from the manufacturing sector in the Czech economy. Data come from the Community Innovation Survey in 2014 and are analyzed using the innovation process econometric modeling. This innovation survey covers the period of a 3 year J-curve of real GDP growth. Czechia is one of the most open economies in the world and has one of the largest shares of exports and imports to GDP. This paper evaluates four types of marketing innovation activities (design, pricing, placing and promotion methods) at the enterprise level as a factor of marketing capability. The analyzed sample consists of observations about new-to-the-market innovators and enterprises that did not engage in new-to-the-market innovation activities in the last three years. The second group are considered to be lower-level innovators, i.e., adaptors to technological change. This paper explores the relationship between local, national, European and World market orientation in addition to an enterprise’s marketing innovation activities. The results suggest that not all types of marketing innovations are dependent on market orientation, while some have indirect positive and negative effects. Feedback and the future effects of marketing innovation activities are present at the enterprise level. Results also suggest that the marketing innovations of innovators form the manufacturing sector while they are dependent upon the strategies of enterprises to enter new geographical markets and gain the motivation to unlock new (hidden) demand. Full article

Operational risk management remains a major concern for financial institutions. Indeed, institutions are bound to manage their own funds to hedge this risk. In this paper, we propose an approach to allocate one’s own funds based on a combination of historical data and expert opinion using the loss distribution approach (LDA) and Bayesian logic. The results show that internal models are of great importance in the process of allocating one’s own funds, and the use of the Delphi method for modelling expert opinion is very useful in ensuring the reliability of estimates. Full article

This study aims to examine the influence of behavioral and demographic factors on indebtedness by constructing a model using specific determinants. The exploratory method is used through the partial least square (SmartPLS) technique, by surveying 320 respondents in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. A self-administered questionnaire was administered to respondents, addressing both demographic and behavioral factors. The results confirmed four of the eight hypotheses stated. Among the determinants, risk perception had a highly significant relationship with both materialism and emotion, while indebtedness had a relationship with emotion and materialism. The findings also indicated that significant differences exist between indebtedness and behavioral factors on the basis of gender, marital status, age, income, and dependence on credit cards and loans. The results may assist various economic players to design better models for credit offerings and address the credit problem in the long term. Full article

After the global crisis of 2008–2009, the world economy entered the era of restructuring. This article focuses on the risks that a new leader will face in the process of shaping the world economy. The methods employed in the research include big data processing of continuous change and the results of the symmetric macroeconomic analysis based on the statistics collected by the International Monetary Fund (IMF), The Word Bank (WB), Bank for International Settlements (BIS), Central banks and Treasuries. The study results proved that the recessionary processes, their depth and global nature, are caused by a combination of world financial system crises and general civilization problems. These new systemic risks for the world economy might result in new global crises that will limit the resources of international financial institutions for sustainable development. Besides, for most banks these crises will mean shifting a big share of derivatives to the off-balance liabilities, using Special Purpose Vehicle (SPV) in deals, followed by an increase in state and corporate debts, trade wars, a slowdown of economic development in China, and widening contradictions between global and national finances. Regular research and systematization have developed certain guidelines for the global economic restructuring process. First of all, it is recommended on the base of interstate compromises to focus on international agreements to ensure a solid foundation for global finance. On the basis of the comparative analysis carried out for the USA, China and other counties, it was made clear that no one leader in world economy in 21st century views the world reserve as based on the currency of one country only. Instead, there will be a slow transition to using Special Drawing Rights (SDR) with a basket from 15–20 currencies G20. Full article

As China’s opening-up grows wider under the Belt and Road Initiative, the exploration and construction of free trade ports have received increasing attention. In 2018, China’s first free trade port was settled in Hainan instead of Shanghai. In 2019, after the Lingang New Area of China (Shanghai) Pilot Free Trade Zone was approved by the central government, six new pilot free trade zones were launched in Shandong, Hebei, Heilongjiang, Jiangsu, Yunnan, and Guangxi provinces. As the bridgehead of the Belt and Road Initiative, Shanghai established the first and biggest pilot free trade zone in China and gained the priority of institutional innovation exploration in Lingang New Area. Whether and how Shanghai will lead the construction of free trade ports and the new round of higher-level opening-up has become a research agenda that requires further study. Based on the document analysis, competition analysis and factor analysis in this paper, the following results were drawn out: (1) The construction of a free trade port is an upgrade of the 18 free trade zones and the 50 cities involved, and it needs more high-level opening-up, more sophisticated services, more rigorous supervision, and more professional talent; (2) With its geographical location, economic foundation, development support, and industrial services, Shanghai has the potential, foundation, and momentum to explore institutional innovation in the construction of pilot free trade zones and free trade port; (3) Development basis, port shipping, talent attraction, service support, risk supervision and control are the five major comparative advantages and the important driving factors that need to be considered in exploring and leading the construction of China’s free trade port under the higher quality development of the Belt and Road Initiative. Full article

In this study, the effects of key audit matters (KAMs), one of the measures recently introduced to improve accounting transparency in the production-to-order industry in terms of corporate sustainability, are examined. After the introduction of KAMs, auditors should publicly disclose key audit matters that had been internally judged in the past. In cases where these are missing or misunderstood, the range of the auditor’s liability may increase. Thus, from the viewpoint of the auditor, the description of KAMs can be recognized as the disclosure of internal judgments and an increase in the risk of litigation. It is judged that, to this end, auditors will perform their auditing work more conservatively in cases where they should describe KAMs. The results of analysis of companies to which KAMs are applied indicate that auditors carried out audits more conservatively for such companies. As such, the result can be interpreted as indicating that, due to the introduction of KAMs, auditors evaluate their risk highly and carry out audits more conservatively in order to reduce the risk. This study is meaningful in that it empirically analyzes the effects of the introduction of the recently implemented KAMs. In addition, this study provides implications for enterprises that prepare financial statements, supervisory institutions that conduct supervision, auditors, and capital market participants, as it presents the finding that, with the introduction of KAMs, auditors perform their work with more conservative perspectives. In addition, the findings of this study provide a basis for future studies on KAMs. Full article

This paper empirically emphasizes the existence of the audit expectation gap and its impact on stakeholders’ confidence, moderated by the active role of the financial reporting council. As a maiden attempt to portray the relationship, a higher-order model has been constituted and assessed with the pragmatic exploration, smearing the partial least squares structural equation model (PLS-SEM). The data contains 174 respondents as auditors, investors, investment and credit analysts, and regulatory agencies in Bangladesh. The study explores audit expectation gap from diverse aspects, such as auditors responsibility for fraud detection, meaning, and usefulness of the audit report, auditors providing the non-audit services, auditors’ responsibility for going concern reporting, and also an unmet expectation for the other assurance services, such as assurance on the other parts of the annual report beyond the financial statements, like management discussion and analysis and corporate social and environmental disclosure. The findings suggest that the audit expectation gap is negatively related to stakeholders’ confidence and the greater the audit expectation gap is, the lower stakeholders’ confidence is in the audit. Auditors maintaining perceived independence and improving the level of communication with users will diminish the audit expectation gap and induce stakeholders’ confidence simultaneously. Moreover, the active role of the financial reporting council acts as a moderator to ensure the auditors’ perceived independence. The result of the study motivates the policymakers to concentrate on the users’ audit-related expectations and also intends the importance of independent audit oversight. Full article

Internet finance is a new form of finance that applies capacities found on the Internet to the traditional financial industry. However, at the present stage, internet finance is faced with many problems, such as overly rapid development and non-standard operation. This paper adopted the evolutionary game theory as the analysis tool to design an evolutionary game model of government audit supervision of Internet finance, and analyzed the evolutionary stability of the strategies used by Internet financial institutions and government financial audit supervision departments. A simulation calculation was carried out by placing the calculation experimental method “Scenario–Coping”, which simulated the initial probability of different strategies adopted by both parties of the game and evaluated the influence of changing the penalty intensity of Internet financial institutions’ violation on the outcome of the evolutionary game. Based on the simulation analysis, the paper provided policy suggestions on strengthening audit supervision and promoting its sustainable development from three aspects: strengthening the construction of the Internet financial credit information system, improving Internet financial laws and regulations, and improving the early warning level of Internet financial credit risk. Full article

Corporate bond defaults in different sectors often increase suddenly at roughly similar times, although some sectors see default rates jump earlier than others. This could reflect contagion among sectors—specifically, defaults in one sector leading to credit stresses in other sectors of the economy that would not otherwise have seen stresses. To complicate matters, simple correlation-based tests for contagion are often biased, reflecting increased volatility in periods of stress. This paper uses sectoral default data from over 30 sectors to test for signs of contagion over the past 30 years. While jumps in sectoral default rates do often coincide, there is no consistent evidence of contagion across different periods of stress from unbiased test results. Instead, coincident jumps in sectoral default rates are likely to reflect common macroeconomic shocks. Full article