This paper employs a VAR-GARCH model to investigate the return links and volatility transmission between the S&P 500 and commodity price indices for energy, food, gold and beverages over the turbulent period from 2000-2011. Understanding the price behavior of commodity prices and the volatility transmission mechanism between these markets and the stock exchanges are crucial for each participant, including governments, traders, portfolio managers, consumers, and producers. For return and volatility spillover, the results show significant transmission among the S&P 500 and commodity markets. The past shocks and volatility of the S&P 500 strongly influenced the oil and gold markets.This study finds that the highest conditional correlations are between the S&P 500 and gold index and the S&P 500 and WTI index. We also analyze the optimal weights and hedge ratios for commodities/S&P 500 portfolio holdings using the estimates for each index. Overall, our findings illustrate several important implications for portfolio hedgers for making optimal portfolio allocations, engaging in risk management and forecasting future volatility in equity and commodity markets.

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This paper examines the impact of bank ownership structure on bank risk-taking. It used balance sheet information for around 72 commercial banks from 10 Middle East and North Africa (MENA) countries from 2000 to 2010. The main results emerged. After controlling for bank characteristics and country effects, we find that concentrated ownership structure is associated with an increase in bank risk-taking. Further, foreign-owned banks are more risked than Domestic-owned banks; however, Government-owned banks are more stable. For listed banks family ownership has positive impact on credit risk. So, family owners impose riskiest strategies when they hold higher stakes. For unlisted banks the effect of family and institutional ownership on risk is negative. Finally we conclude that the effect of owners identity on bank risk-taking depends on the fact that bank is listed or unlisted.

This paper's main objective is to examine the effect of corporate governance on earnings manipulations using BTD proxy. We investigate whether ownership structure board and audit committee characters affect earnings and tax management. Based on a sample of 21 corporations listed on Tunisian stock market during the period 2003-2012, our study employs regression analysis to test the prediction that the governance attributes reduces the likelihood of earnings and tax aggressiveness. We find that the ownership structure is an important corporate governance mechanism that affects BTD. We find that BTD does not vary with board size and the cumulative effect of the function of chief executive and president of the board. We find that the percentage of outside directors is associated with managerial discretion. Finally, we find that the audit committee influences ABTD through the variable relating to the financial expertise of the committee.

In this study, we examine empirically whether the gap between the pre-tax income and the taxable income predicts simultaneously earnings management and tax management. Prior researches have begun to estimate several indictors of earnings quality. We extends this works by investigating whether the book-tax differences (BTD) provides information about managerial discretion. BTD can be used as an attribute of information quality and can contain incremental information for investors and users of financial reports of companies We compose a sample of 21 listed Tunisian firms over the 2003-2012 periods, we apply a statistical methodology implementing a linear panel regression. We develop a model in which we estimate abnormal BTD. All earnings and tax management activities are captures by our abnormal BTD indicator (ABTD). From this regression we are going to test the effect of the variables of the earnings and tax management on the ABTD variable. We find, as expected, a significant association between BTD and manager discretion proxies. Our results indicate that BTD contains a predictive power over the earnings and tax management. We find that Tunisian companies are concerned about tax reducing rather than improved information quality and increasing the financial result.