Based on a sample of 782 acquisitions by UK firms during 1982-2009, this paper examines the impact of cross-border acquisitions on financial leverage. The paper shows that cross-border acquisitions have a negative impact on the financial leverage of acquiring firms. However, the negative impact of crossborder acquisitions disappears when acquirers choose targets from developed countries, and also when the acquisitions are undertaken by multinational firms. Collectively, the findings imply that exposure to foreign markets reduces the borrowing ability of acquiring firms especially when they choose targets from developing countries, and when they have no experience in foreign markets.

We examine the impact of the adoption of International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) on firm value using a sample of African listed firms selected over the 2000-2015 period. Our results show that the adoption of IFRS positively impacts firm value. We further find that the impact of IFRS adoption on firm value is more pronounced in environments where there is a greater commitment to the rule of law. Moreover, the increase in firm value is more pronounced for firms with a higher degree of financial constraints. Finally, additional results suggest that the benefits of fully implementing IFRS are higher than those arising from partial/modified adoption. Our results are robust to controlling for other factors that affect firm value and to alternative sampling procedures.

In the context of mergers and acquisitions, we provide evidence to suggest that a firm's deviation from its optimal financial leverage may impede its ability to undertake future expansions. We also find the negative effect of leverage deviation on acquisition probability to be moderated by firms’ existing capabilities. Further, we find those deviating firms to have better prospects of achieving growth when they pursue cross‐industry and/or cross‐country mergers and acquisitions. Overall, our findings imply that deviations from the optimal financial leverage may be costly to firms but this cost is not symmetric across all firms and all deal types.

Departing from the existing literature, which associates credit information sharing with improved access to credit in advanced economies, we examine whether credit information sharing can also reduce loan default rate for banks domiciled in developing countries. Using a large dataset covering 879 unique banks from 87 developing countries from every continent, over a nine-year period (i.e., over 6,300 observations), we uncover three new findings. First, we find that credit information sharing reduces loan default rate. Second, we show that the relationship between credit information sharing and loan default rate is conditional on banking market concentration. Third, our findings suggest that governance quality at the country level does not have a strong moderating role on the effect of credit information sharing on loan default rate.

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to examine how managers of African firms, operating in environments characterised by less developed capital markets and weak institutional structures, make use of their internally generated cash flows. Design/methodology/approach The authors use a panel data methodology which regresses a particular use of cash flow (e.g. capital expenditure) on the internally generated operating cash flow of a firm and a set of control variables. The estimation of the regression model is done by ordinary least squares regressions. For robustness, the authors also estimate the models using system generalised method of moments to control for endogeneity and measurement error problems. Findings The authors find that managers of African firms hold most of their internally generated cash flows, and when they decide to spend, they allocate a higher proportion towards dividend payments; followed by debt adjustments; then to investments; and lastly, to equity repurchases. Research limitations/implications The findings are consistent with the existence of a significant financial constraint in African markets, and the use of dividends to signal credit quality in relatively underdeveloped capital markets. Originality/value The authors provide a more extensive analysis of how a firm spends a unit of the incremental cash flow it generates. In particular, the analysis shows that beyond investments in capital expenditure, other cash flow uses (i.e. cash holdings, dividend payments, and adjustments in debt and equity capital) which have been largely overlooked in the literature are important to understanding the effects of financial constraints on corporate decisions. Also, the early empirical evidence on the cash flow allocations of African firms could be a step in the right direction in informing theory development in this area.

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Whilst the ongoing banking regulatory reforms towards a comprehensive Basel III framework emphasise bank transparency, disclosure and a competitive banking market environment, very little is known about the empirical relationship between bank opacity and banking competition. We investigate the impact of competition, as measured by the individual bank's pricing power in the banking market, on bank opacity using a large sample of US bank holding companies over the 1986-2015 period. We uncover new evidence, on the competition-bank opacity nexus, which suggests that banks with higher market power and operating in less competitive banking markets have lower analysts' forecast errors and dispersions and may thus be less opaque. This effect is more pronounced for the 2007-09 global financial crisis period. Our evidence is robust to controlling for analysts' characteristics, bank fixed-effects and endogeneity problems.

We explore the relations between firms' internal capabilities, national governance quality (NGQ) and performance in the African context using a dataset comprised of 11,183 firm-year observations (1,490 unique firms from 15 African countries over a 17-year period). Our study offers new insights into how interlinkages between firms' internal and external environment, shape corporate success. Specifically, we find that (1) firms' internal capabilities (captured by financial resource-availability and growth prospects) are critical enablers of performance in both weak and strong institutional environments, (2) individual firms perform well in environments where their peers performs well, (3) NGQ directly enhances aggregate firm performance, and in tandem, the performance of individual firms, and (4) NGQ moderates the capability-performance nexus, by enhancing the translation of growth opportunities into profitability. The results highlight the critical role of firm-level financial resource availability and growth prospects in shaping corporate success in this challenging institutional environment.