Corporate Governance and Voluntary Disclosure: Evidence from Jordan

Abstract: Th

The impact of urban housing prices on labour mobility: evidence from cities in China

Urban development relies heavily on labour, while the change in urban housing prices, in turn, has a crucial impact on labour. Therefore, the regulatory policies of housing prices have become a critical content of urban management worldwide for a long time. Based on the theoretical analysis of urban housing prices and labour mobility, we use fixed-effect panel model with the panel data of 281 cities in China from 2002 to 2018. We study the impact of rising urban housing prices on labour and identify the housing price jump as an instrumental variable in solving the endogenous problem. The results are as follows. First, the increase in urban housing prices has a crowding-out effect on labour mobility. Second, there is a moderating effect on different levels of education, urban construction, and income under the impact of urban housing prices on labour mobility. Third, the heterogeneity of the impact is reflected in the housing price-to-income ratios and industrial structures. These conclusions are supposed to have significant enlightenment for controlling the urban housing prices during high-quality economic growth and guiding labour flow more rationally

Does governance affect compliance with IFRS 7?

Although there has been considerable research on the impact of corporate governance on corporate voluntary disclosure, empirical evidence on how governance affects compliance with mandatory disclosure requirements is limited. We contribute to governance and disclosure literature by examining the impact of corporate governance on compliance with IFRS 7 for the banking sector in Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC). We use a self-constructed disclosure index to measure compliance with IFRS 7. We use regression analyses to examine the impact of board characteristics, audit committee characteristics and ownership structure on compliance with IFRS 7. Using a sample of 335 bank-year observations for GCC listed banks over the period 2011–2017, we report evidence that corporate governance variables affect compliance with IFRS 7. However, the significance of these variables depends on the type of the regression model used. Our findings suggest that governance matters for mandatory disclosure requirements. So to improve the level of compliance, regulators, official authorities, and policymakers should intensify their efforts toward improving corporate governance codes, following up their implementation and enhancing the enforcement mechanisms

Editorial: sustainability, environmental responsibility and innovation

No abstract available

Auditing in the time of social distancing: The effect of COVID-19 on auditing quality

The file attached to this record is the author's final peer reviewed version.Purpose: Our paper aims to discuss the theoretical impact of Covid-19 social distancing outbreak on audit quality. Design/methodology/approach: Our paper uses a desk study method to explore the possible impact of COVID-19 crisis on five key considerations for audit quality during the pandemic. These include audit fees, going concern assessment, auditor human capital, audit procedures and audit personnel salaries. Findings: As many believe that the COVID-19 outbreak is as yet not a financial crisis, we, on the contrary, believe that the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic would be the toughest challenge for auditors and their clients since the 2007-2008 global financial crisis. Specifically, we believe that the COVID-19 social distancing can largely affect audit fees, going concern assessment, audit human capital, audit procedures, audit personnel salaries, and audit effort, which ultimately can pose a severe impact on audit quality. Practical implications: Due to the implementations of work-from-home strategy, audit firms are highly recommended to invest more in digital programs, including artificial intelligence, blockchain, network security, and data function development. This can help them to be more adaptable to working from home experience, which is ultimately expected to enhance the effectiveness and the flexibility of communication between auditors and their clients. Also, we recommend stock markets and other governmental bodies to provide temporary relaxations in compliance requirements to corporations. This procedure is expected to help firms that apply work-from-home strategy to report better earnings figures, which is appeared to be positively associated with audit quality. Originality/value: To date, to the best of our knowledge, there is no academic study that explores the potential impact of the COVID-19 outbreak on audit quality. This paper, therefore, fills an important research gap in the auditing literature. In addition, our paper can be used as a base to construct a research instrument (e.g., questionnaire or interviews) to provide empirical evidence on the potential impact of COVID-19 on audit quality

Business environmental innovation and CO₂ emissions:the moderating role of environmental governance

This paper examines the effects of environmental innovation on CO2 emissions as well as the moderating role of environmental governance in this relationship. Based on a sample of companies listed on the London Stock Exchange for the period from 2016 to 2020, the findings show that environmental innovation reduces CO2 emissions including Scope 1 and Scope 2 CO2 emissions. Likewise, our findings are associative of a moderating effect of environmental governance on the environmental innovation-CO2 emissions nexus. We argue that environmental innovation along with better environmental governance leads to a reduction in CO2 emissions. Our results hold for subsamples of firms with a strong/low environmental governance and ESG performance. Our findings offer important implications for companies and policymakers towards adopting more environmental technologies along with enhancing environmental governance to reduce CO2 emissions