There is a lack of research about the political strategies used by firms in emerging countries, mainly because the literature often assumes that Western-oriented corporate political activity (CPA) has universal application. Drawing on resourcedependency logics, we explore why and how firms orchestrate CPA in the institutionally challenging context of Nigeria. Our findings show that firms deploy four context-fitting but ethically suspect political strategies: affective, financial, pseudoattribution and kinship strategies. We leverage this understanding to contribute to CPA in emerging countries by arguing that corporate political strategies are shaped by the reciprocity and duality of dependency relationships between firms and politicians, and also by advancing that these strategies reflect institutional weaknesses and unique industry-level opportunities. Importantly, we shed light on the muttered dark side of CPA. We develop a CPA framework and discuss the research, practical and policy implications of our findings.

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The paper examines how the Statutory Audit and Corporate Reporting Directives (SACORD) affect the compliance costs, risk taking and quality of financial reporting of the EU banks. Using a natural experiment, we find that post SACORD, both compliance costs and risk taking increase significantly. However, the implementation of additional regulations seems to be effective in terms of improved quality of financial reporting. When we analyse the impact by size, we find that smaller banks face disproportionately higher increase in compliance costs while larger banks seem to engage in greater risk taking.

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This paper investigates whether the deal premium affects the performance of the acquiring firms in European mergers and acquisitions (M&As) deals for the period 2000-2013. We find a significant reduction in short-term performance of the acquiring firms after the M&As, reflecting the overpayment hypothesis. Our result also indicates that the negative effect on the performance of the acquiring firms is less pronounced in the long-term. The result confirms the synergy hypothesis and the existence of quadratic relationship between high premium and performance. Our findings are robust as we control for firm and time trends. The findings of our study have implications for companies engaging in acquisitions in Europe.