Earnings Management and Investor Protection: An International Comparison

What makes organizations so similar? We contend that the engine of rationalization and bureaucratization has moved from the competitive marketplace to the state and the professions. Once a set of organizations emerges as a field, a paradox arises: rational actors make their organizations increasingly similar as they try to change them. We describe three isomorphic processes-coercive, mimetic, and normative—leading to this outcome. We then specify hypotheses about the impact of resource centralization and dependency, goal ambiguity and technical uncertainty, and professionalization and structuration on isomorphic change. Finally, we suggest implications for theories of organizations and social change.

The iron cage revisited: Institutional isomorphism and collective rationality in organizational fields (Chinese Translation)

(1991). Applied Linear Regression Models. Journal of Quality Technology: Vol. 23, No. 1, pp. 76-77.

Applied Linear Regression Models

Why nations fail? The origins of Power, Prosperity and Poverty

Some previous histories of southern education, such as Charles W. Dabney's
classic Universal Education in the South, slighted the role of American
Americans in shaping their own education. James Anderson's new book, the
best single volume on black education in the post-bellum south, commits the
opposite error. Anderson exaggerates the power and autonomy of southern
ex-slaves during Reconstruction and of southern blacks in general during the
Jim Crow era, and correspondingly underemphasizes the significance for their
education of the efforts of former free people of colour, northern blacks and
whites and white southerners. While meriting praise for its uncovering of the
role of ordinary people struggling to improve their educational lot, Anderson's
revisionist book almost wholly excludes electoral, legislative and administrative
politics. The exclusions and lopsided emphases make it nearly as one-sided
and incomplete as the white-centred, bureaucrat-dominated history that
it seeks to replace.

The Education of Blacks in the South, 1860-1935 [Book Review]

The impact of the US yield curve on sub-Saharan African equities

This paper assesses the contribution of country governance structures to resolving the unsettled crowding-in–crowding-out hypothesis of public and private investments and arresting the recent fall ...

Explaining public investment dynamics in Sub-Saharan Africa: The role of country governance structures

• We examine the time-frequency connectedness between world food commodities. • World food commodities are highly connected in the short- and long-term horizons. • Contagious return spillovers between food commodities are propagated by vegetable oil. • Diversification (safe-haven) properties of food commodities are consistently found in the meat market across tranquil (exuberant) trading periods. • Spillovers between food commodities are dominated by idiosyncratic shocks. This study examines the time-frequency connectedness of food commodities (cereals, dairy, food, meat, vegetable oil, and sugar) in the Food and Agriculture Organization's world food indices. With a monthly-frequency dataset covering February 1990 to October 2021, we utilise the returns spillover index approach of Baruník and Křehlík (2018). The results are robust to the time-varying parameter vector autoregressive (TVP-VAR) connectedness approach. The findings explicate that food commodities are highly connected in the short- and long-term horizons. The dynamic total connectedness varies from 15% to 80% in the short term, 1% to 70%, in the medium-term, and 1% to 75% in the long-term, with high fluctuations in notable crisis periods. Contagious returns spillovers between food commodities are propagated by vegetable oil. Diversification and safe-haven properties of food commodities are consistently found in the meat market across tranquil and exuberant trading periods, respectively. The safe-haven role of sugar in recent episodes of financial crises is highlighted by our findings. The economic, policy, and portfolio implications of our results are discussed. 

Time-frequency connectedness between food commodities: New implications for portfolio diversification

Abstract The insurance industry is a contributor to gross domestic product (GDP) in the Ghanaian economy and, thus, effort at improving its financial soundness through tax planning (TP) could enhance its level of GDP contribution. Previous studies on TP have been conducted mainly among the non-financial firms, with few on banks. This study turns the attention of TP towards the insurance industry, which has been a good source of fund mobilization in the country. Within the systems panel dynamic generalized method of moments (GMM) framework, the study examined the moderating impact of corporate governance (CG) on the relationship between TP and the performance of insurance companies in Ghana. The study employs the causal design to examine the extent and nature of the cause-and-effect relationship between the quantitative variables used. The data comprised of 117 observations from 35 Ghanaian Insurance firms over the 2012–2017 period. The study found evidence of a non-linear relationship between tax planning measured by effective tax rate (ETR) and the performance of insurance companies measured by return on equity (ROE) and return on asset (ROA). Moreover, the study found that CG moderated the relationship between TP and the performance of insurance companies. The study recommends that managers of insurance companies intensify the CG measures to help mitigate the agency conflict and associated costs between management and shareholders.

Tax planning and financial performance of insurance companies in Ghana: the moderating role of corporate governance

The paper examines the antecedence of the size of private sector credit disbursement in Ghana using symmetric and asymmetric ARDL processes. We find that the treasury bill rates have both a direct and an indirect impact on the amount of credit channelled to the private sector with positive shocks dominating the stimulating effect of the treasury bill rate. Similarly, negative shocks in the average lending rates have a detrimental effect on the credit to the private sector which supports the view that banks use interest rates to ration credit. Also, the saving rates have a direct and indirect effect on private sector credit but positive shocks in the savings rate have a detrimental effect on the amount of credit to the private sector. Moreover, we found a dominance positive effect of the shocks in foreign currency deposits on private sector credit disbursement. Finally, a rise in crude oil prices induces private sector allocation in Ghana even though the effect of oil prices on credit appears mixed.

https://archive.aessweb.com/index.php/5008/article/download/217/410

Samuel Kwaku Agyei

Papers

The impact of the US yield curve on sub-Saharan African equities

Explaining public investment dynamics in Sub-Saharan Africa: The role of country governance structures

Time-frequency connectedness between food commodities: New implications for portfolio diversification

Tax planning and financial performance of insurance companies in Ghana: the moderating role of corporate governance

Determinants of the Size of Private Sector Credit Disbursement in Ghana