This study examines how board gender diversity can address the challenges to adopt environment management systems (EMS) to improve firm performance. Firstly, drawing on gender socialization and diversity theories, higher board gender diversity motivates firms to adopt EMS. Empirical evidence shows that firms with gender diverse boards are greener. Secondly, the study investigates the maxim that green pays to be green. The empirical findings highlight a positive and statistically significant but economically modest link between EMS and firm financial performance. However, the inclusion of board gender diversity as moderator significantly improves the relationship between EMS and firm performance. In addition, CEO gender is linked to better performance only in firms with low female board diversity. The findings strongly recommend higher board gender diversity as a mechanism to address the challenges of EMS and firm performance simultaneously. The findings are robust to controlling for propensity score matching technique and are different in different approaches.

This study analyses risk-return trade-off and behaviour of various volatility dynamics including: volatility, its persistence, mean reversion and speed of mean reversion along with asymmetry and leverage effect on the Pakistani stock market by employing aggregate (aggregate market level) and disaggregate (sectoral level) monthly data for the period from 1998 to 2012. Three generalised autoregressive conditional heteroscedasticity models were applied: GARCH (1,1) for various volatility dynamics; EGARCH for asymmetric and leverage effect and GARCH-M for pricing of risk. The outcomes of the study are as follows: first, the volatility shocks are quite persistent but with varying degrees across the sectors. Both the ARCH effect (short-term effect) and GARCH effect (long-term effect) play their role in generating conditional future stock returns volatility. Further, overall the volatility process is mean reverting; however, the speed of mean reversion varies across the sectors. Secondly, the current study finds little evidence of asymmetry and leverage effect at both aggregate and disaggregates data. Thirdly, the pricing of risk (positive risk premium) is also evident, particularly at the disaggregate data in the Pakistani stock market. Finally, this research study sets the implications for both the policy makers and investors.

The purpose of this study is to explore how various dimensions of leadership style are being used to measure organizational effectiveness. Job satisfaction is one of the essential indicators used to measure organizational effectiveness. Literature suggests that the manager’s transformational leadership style highly influences the employees’ job satisfaction. This study focuses on identifying the role of a transformational leader in developing job satisfaction in employees of the banking industry, using the organizations’ learning culture as the moderating variable. For this purpose, a total of 180 respondents were surveyed from UAE’s banking sector. In this study descriptive statistics, Pearson’s correlation coefficient, and multiple regression analysis were employed for the data analyses. The results confirmed that the five dimensions of transformational leaders and overall transformational leadership style significantly affect the employee’s job satisfaction, whereas the moderating effect of the organizational learning culture on any of the said relationships was found insignificant. This study used self-reported data based on a cross-sectional survey in the banking sector only. The research emphasizes the implication of the leaders’ personal traits to be a significant determinant of an employee’s satisfaction. In addition, managers in the banking sector in UAE realized that organization learning culture (OLC) has not had any significant impact on employees’ job satisfaction. As there is not sufficient literature on the moderating role of organizational learning culture, this study is a valuable contribution to the existing body of knowledge.

This study explores the effect of selected economic factors on stock return volatility along with asymmetry and leverage effects on comparative basis of the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) and Pakistan Stock Exchange (PSX). These dimensions are further investigated with respect to size and age of the firms. The daily stock returns of all the firms on both NYSE and PSX and macroeconomic factors are considered for the period 2000-2015. The results from GARCH (1, 1) revealed that all the economic factors have proven their significance in determining the stock returns volatility in both the markets with respect to firm's size and age. More precisely, a negative relationshi p is observed for market returns (MR), exchange rate (EXR), and oil returns (OIL) with stock return volatility for majority of the firms in both stock markets. Furthermore, risk-free rate (RFR) showed positive and negative effect on the stock return volatility of majority of the firms in NYSE and PSX markets respectively. However, with respect to size and age effects, firms in both the markets exhibited entirely different behavior for all the macroeconomic factors. Further, using EGARCH model, an evidence of asymmetry and leverage effect (with negative coefficient) is found in NYSE and partial evidence (both negative and positive coefficients) in PSX is observed. Again, these results vary with respect to firms' features in both the markets. Therefore, the results of the current study clearly show that there are significant differences in both markets and the investors can diversify their investments and shape their liquidity positions in both markets in order to exploit the maximum benefits from the market and firms specific factors.

The choice for corporate social responsibility (CSR) as a strategic tool remains a debatable issue. While past studies suggest that the financial performance of a firm is the primary driver of CEO turnover; we found that a firm's CSR performance also has a relationship with CEO turnover, a negative relationship. Consistent with the hypotheses, our findings suggest that firm's CSR performance positively moderates the firm's financial performance–CEO turnover relationship. The firm's negative CSR performance–CEO turnover relationship is more pronounced in highCSR‐ranked firms. Precisely, the findings posit that CSR appears to (a) reduce likelihood of CEO turnover in general, (b) somewhat increases the likelihood of CEO turnover in case of poor financial performance, and (c) greatly reduces the likelihood of CEO turnover in case of better financial performance is good. Therefore, a CEO who is motivated to deliver profits in a socially responsible way may face both positive and negative personal consequences. Given the importance of the board gender diversity/gender critical mass, our findings show that the presence of gender critical mass moderates the firm's negative performance (CSR and ROA)–CEO turnover relationship. Further, we split the sample into low and highCSR‐ranked firms, and the findings show that the presence of gender critical mass substitutes the firm's negative performance (CSR and ROA)–CEO turnover relation in highCSR‐ranked firms; whereas, it moderates the relation in lowCSR‐ranked firms. Therefore, the presence of gender critical mass supports the statement that “CSR—combined with board gender diversity—is the new competitive environment for CEOs.”