Current situation in COVID-19 pandemic as well as the significant digital transformation, where the whole world is being forced to participate, are lead for a wide acceptance to use the mobile payments. The main objective for the current study is to focus on analysing the primary variable “intention to use” through the Apple Wallet mobile payment system “apple wallet app” in United Arab Emirates (UAE), in addition to defining a context and evaluating the various antecedents of its use. The main variables that addressed by the current study are ability to use (skilfulness), perceived usefulness, convenience of the system, perceived risk and the primary variable that mentioned before was intention to use. To conduct the study, we invited 422 respondents to an online survey, and we have used a structural equation modelling analysis. The results indicate that mobile user skilfulness is the variable that most influences the intention to use the proposed payment system, followed by perceived usefulness and convenience of the system, while the perceived risk has a weak negative relationship with intention to use mobile payment via apple wallet app in the light of high Cybersecurity Index in the UAE.

Past studies have mostly investigated the significance of financial attributes in trade affairs of developed countries, while dismissing such importance among developing nations. As such, this study looked into the influence of financial leverage upon the growth of Jordanian firms. For that purpose, a sample of 91 firms from Jordan had been analyzed via panel data regression method for the period between 2006 and 2015. As a result, the findings portrayed the irrelevance between financial leverage and growth of assets, but a significantly positive correlation with the growth of sales and employment. On top of that, this study revealed that growth of sales and employment had been significantly and positively correlated with firm size. In short, this study dismissed the speculation the constraint Jordanian firms were in, but on the contrary, displayed the ability to gain external financing to ascertain successful progress.

The primary objective of shareholders and financial managers is generally stated to be the maximization of shareholders' wealth by increasing the firm value. This research was undertaken to investigate the effect of corporate financing decisions on firm value. The research has been carried out using the panel data procedure for a sample of 256 firms from 9 sectors listed on Bursa Malaysia during the period 2000-2015. The study uses Tobin's Q representing firm value for the dependent variable. The corporate financing was measured by leverage (short-term debt to total assets, long-term debt to total assets, total debt to total assets and total debt to total equity) and debt maturity (long-term debt to total debt). Short-term debt to total assets and long-term debt to total assets has a positive significant relationship to firm value. This finding is consistent with the view that leverage and dividends mitigate agency costs of free cash flow problems, therefore, increasing firm value. Total debt to total assets affects firm value negatively. This proves that although there are benefits of debts, there is also the cost of debts. The cost of debt financing arises from the increase in the probability of bankruptcy. Firm value does not depend on the length of debt maturity.

Effect of accounting information on the share price has been having the share of attention from researchers for over six decades owing to the increasing of global financial crisis. Hence, this study attempts to contribute to literature by investigating such relationship in Jordan, a developing country. Specifically, this study investigates the relationship between the cash flow and accruals on share price of listed companies on Amman Stock Exchange for the year 2002 to 2014 also the effect of financial crisis on the share price before and after 2008. The model of this study was theoretically founded on both the agency and the signaling theories. To examine the developed model, the required data were gathered from the annual reports of 236 listed Companies. In analyzing the data, this study utilized the panel data methodology on 117 companies with 1521 observations. Moreover, this study used audit quality (audit firm size and audit tenure) as moderating variable. Based on the panel data results, the fixed effect model was used to examine the effect of the cash flows and accruals on the share price. The accruals and cash flows combined have significant effects on the share prices of the Jordanian companies listed on ASE. Audit quality, whether auditor’s firm size or auditor’s tenure, has significant moderating effect on associations of the share prices with accruals and with cash flows and the 2008 financial crisis had negative effects on share prices of the Jordanian companies listed on ASE. This study provides deep insights into relative usefulness of cash-based and accrual-based accounting measures and assist investors, regulators, analysts, and other stakeholders in evaluating the liquidity and financial performance of Jordanian companies listed on ASE, which may result in better allocation of economic resources by enabling the investors to take informed investment decisions, thus promoting a more efficient Jordanian capital market.

The monitoring role of the board of directors has been extensively slammed as being ineffective since it depends on several factors. This study sheds light on some of the directors’ attributes and the impact on mitigating the opportunistic behaviour. By adopting different perspectives, we argued whether the directors with more expertise, tenure, outside directorships become more effective in mitigating the opportunistic behaviour. These attributes could have a curvilinear effect since such optimal attributes could improve the competency level of the directors. Hence, the board becomes more effective. Meanwhile, its effect could turn inversely to make the directors ineffective. This study adopted discretionary accruals as an indicator for earnings management. A sample of 114 service and industrial firms listed in Amman Stock Exchange (ASE) from 2009-2015 were chosen for this study. Pooled OLS regression model is enlisted to avoid the inconsistently of the slope across individual units and time period. Results show that the directors with financial expertise are more effective to minimise the level of earnings management practices. Conversely, the independent directors with high tenure besides the higher directors with outside directorships are engaged with a high level of earnings management practices. This implies the existence of each of the friendliness hypothesis and the busyness hypothesis in the Jordanian market. Similarly, this also explains the weakness of the board of directors in complying to their monitoring role in the emerging markets in general.

In this article, the co-movement between GCC and US stock market returns was investigated using the wavelet coherence method. The Dynamic Conditional Correlation GARCH (DCC-GARCH) modelling is then applied on timevarying components in order to provide a point of comparison with the results extracted from wavelet analysis. The investigation was conducted on the weekly stock index prices of two USA stock markets, namely Dow Jones and S&P 500 and six GCC stock markets, namely the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Oman, Kuwait, and Bahrain. The data were retrieved from Thomson Reuters's data stream and the sample duration was from 7 January 2007 to 24 June 2018. As a result, a definite co-movement between several GCC stock markets and those of the US stock markets for a long term was found. Moreover, the results also displayed signs of the significant disparity between the co-movements of the stock markets throughout the scales of time during economic decline. This phenomenon was possibly expected during the economic decline, where a significant divergence occurred as opposed to co-movement. The implications of the findings for global investors were considerable due to the indication from long-term co-movement that these investors would not be capable of gaining simultaneous profit from time and portfolio being diversified. In fact, the results showed the major difference in the opportunities for international portfolio diversification throughout these markets in terms of scale and time.

The purpose of this study is to explore the direct relationship between sustainable development practices and financial performance. It also examines the moderating effect of transformational leadership approach on this relationship. Using primary data sources, this study presents a case study of the Jordanian construction industry. A survey of 290 managing directors or his appointed representative for 1113 construction companies in Jordan. Data were collected from October 2017 until April 2018. The multiple regression analysis and hierarchical multiple regression analysis are used to verify the hypotheses of this study. Analyzed data reveals a positive relationship among sustainability development factors (i.e. environmental, economic, social aspects) and financial performance. Furthermore, the result of hierarchical multiple regression has shown that the moderating effect of transformational leadership is significant only on the relationship between Environmental aspects and financial performance. Also, the transformational leadership does not moderate the impact of "Economic aspects and Social aspects" on the financial performance. This work strengthens the previous findings in the available literature as to how sustainability practices enhance the construction firms' performance. Moreover, this study involves the moderating role of transformational leadership on the main relation which also proves and supports the existing knowledge on performance measurement and performance of organisations. This study also contributes to practical aspects, by providing contractors with insights into implementing sustainability practices and tools to measure the sustainable construction firms' performance.

Prior studies have focused on the role that the institutional investors play to control managerial behaviours as one of the factors of the external ownership in the developed countries specifically. Nevertheless, scant attention has given to the external ownership role whether the institutional or the foreign investors to maintain the minority shareholder interest especially with the presence of the central agency problem in the emerging markets such as Jordan. Thus, this study argued the monitoring role of the external ownership factors can minimize the managerial opportunistic behaviours through examining the relationship between external ownership factors and earnings management. Earnings management proxies using the performance-adjusted discretionary accruals model (Kothari et al. 2005 model) by applying the cross-sectional method to determine model parameters for each industry in each year. In order to achieve objectives of this research a sample of 798 firm-observation of the Jordanian non-financial firms listed in ASE during the period 2009-2015 were collected. The random-effect GLS regression model is used after following the correct procedures of the panel data analysis to determine the appropriate model as stated by the results of Hausman and LM tests. Hence, the correcting robust standard errors estimates method was used since the data was suffered from the heteroscedasticity problem. The results show that the institutional ownership in Jordan plays a vital role in mitigating the opportunistic behaviours of managers. Likewise, the existence of foreign ownership in firms minimizes the level of earnings management practices. These support the hypotheses that the institutional and foreign investors are able to control the managers of the firm. Also, provide evidence about the similarities between the role of the foreign investors and the role of institutional investors since there is a shortage of the evidence about foreign investors role especially with earnings management.