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The effects of corporate governance mechanisms on the financial leverage–profitability relation

Purpose This paper aims to investigate the moderating effects of corporate governance mechanisms on the financial leverage–profitability relation in emerging market firms. Design/methodology/approach The paper examines the impacts by estimating the empirical model in which a firm’s accounting profitability is a dependent variable, while financial leverage, board size, board independence, CEO duality, CEO ownership, state ownership and the interaction variables are predictors. The paper uses the panel data set of 295 listed firms in Vietnam in the period 2011-2015 and two key econometric methods for panel data, namely, the two-stage least square instrumental variable and general moments method. Findings The paper finds the evidence for the significant and positive effect of board size, board independence and state ownership on the financial leverage–profitability relation. The effect of CEO duality on the financial leverage–profitability relation tends to be negative, and the impact CEO ownership inclines to be positive, although both of them are statistically insignificant. The results are consistent across different estimation methods. Originality/value This paper is the first investigating the moderating effect of various corporate governance mechanisms on the financial leverage–profitability relationship in emerging market firms

Debt financing and firm performance: The moderating role of board independence

This article investigates the moderating role of board independence in the relationship between debt financing and performance of emerging market firms. We have used an empirical model in which the firm’s accounting profitability is a dependent variable and the independent variables are debt financing, board independence, the interaction variable made of debt financing and board independence as well as various control variables. Our analysis is based on a panel data set of 300 listed firms in Vietnam between 2013 and 2017. Our study finds that debt financing has a significantly negative effect and that board independence reduces the adverse impact of debt financing on accounting profitability. Our results are consistent across different estimation models and methods

On efficient estimators of the proportion of true null hypotheses in a multiple testing setup

We consider the problem of estimating the proportion $\theta$ of true null hypotheses in a multiple testing context. The setup is classically modeled through a semiparametric mixture with two components: a uniform distribution on interval $[0,1]$ with prior probability $\theta$ and a nonparametric density $f$. We discuss asymptotic efficiency results and establish that two different cases occur whether $f$ vanishes on a set with non null Lebesgue measure or not. In the first case, we exhibit estimators converging at parametric rate, compute the optimal asymptotic variance and conjecture that no estimator is asymptotically efficient (i.e. attains the optimal asymptotic variance). In the second case, we prove that the quadratic risk of any estimator does not converge at parametric rate. We illustrate those results on simulated data

Nonparametric estimation of the density of the alternative hypothesis in a multiple testing setup. Application to local false discovery rate estimation

In a multiple testing context, we consider a semiparametric mixture model with two components where one component is known and corresponds to the distribution of $p$-values under the null hypothesis and the other component $f$ is nonparametric and stands for the distribution under the alternative hypothesis. Motivated by the issue of local false discovery rate estimation, we focus here on the estimation of the nonparametric unknown component $f$ in the mixture, relying on a preliminary estimator of the unknown proportion $\theta$ of true null hypotheses. We propose and study the asymptotic properties of two different estimators for this unknown component. The first estimator is a randomly weighted kernel estimator. We establish an upper bound for its pointwise quadratic risk, exhibiting the classical nonparametric rate of convergence over a class of H\"older densities. To our knowledge, this is the first result establishing convergence as well as corresponding rate for the estimation of the unknown component in this nonparametric mixture. The second estimator is a maximum smoothed likelihood estimator. It is computed through an iterative algorithm, for which we establish a descent property. In addition, these estimators are used in a multiple testing procedure in order to estimate the local false discovery rate. Their respective performances are then compared on synthetic data

Effects of the 2008 Financial Crisis on developing Asia's Economic Growth

The aim of this paper is to study macro aspect of the virulent impacts of the 2008 financial crisis on Asian developing economies. To do this, we apply the Pedroni panel co-integration technique developed to examine the long-run relationship between economic growth, exports and inward FDI on a sample of selected Asian developing countries over the period 1995-2008. Our main finding is that FDI inflows and exports exert a significant and positive impact on developing Asia's economic growth. The 2008 global financial crisis is, therefore, likely to have a significant effect on developing Asia's economic growth through two main transmission channels - FDI and exports channels.Financial crisis, Exports, FDI, Economic growth, Developing countries.