SummaryCredit scoring has been regarded as a core appraisal tool of different institutions during the last few decades, and has been widely investigated in different areas, such as finance and accounting. Different scoring techniques are being used in areas of classification and prediction, where statistical techniques have conventionally been used. Both sophisticated and traditional techniques, as well as performance evaluation criteria are investigated in the literature. The principal aim of this paper is to carry out a comprehensive review of 214 articles/books/theses that involve credit scoring applications in various areas, in general, but primarily in finance and banking, in particular. This paper also aims to investigate how credit scoring has developed in importance, and to identify the key determinants in the construction of a scoring model, by means of a widespread review of different statistical techniques and performance evaluation criteria. Our review of literature revealed that there is no overall best statistical technique used in building scoring models and the best technique for all circumstances does not yet exist. Also, the applications of the scoring methodologies have been widely extended to include different areas, and this subsequently can help decision makers, particularly in banking, to predict their clients" behaviour. Finally, this paper also suggests a number of directions for future research.

Purpose: This paper investigates the effect of corporate board attributes, ownership structure and firm-level characteristics on both corporate mandatory and voluntary disclosure behaviour in annual reports of Libyan firms.Design/methodology/approach: Multivariate regression techniques are used to estimate the effect of corporate board and ownership structures on mandatory and voluntary disclosures of a sample of Libyan firms between 2006 and 2010.Findings: First, we find that board size, board composition, the frequency of board meetings and the presence of an audit committee have an impact on the level of corporate disclosure. Second, this study finds an evidence that director ownership, foreign ownership, government ownership and institutional ownership have a non-linear effect on the level of corporate disclosure. Finally, we find that firm age, liquidity, listing status, industry type and auditor type are positively associated with the level of corporate disclosure.Limitation: Future research could investigate disclosure practices using other channels of corporate disclosure, such as corporate websites. Useful insights may be offered also by future studies by conducting in-depth interviews with corporate managers, directors and owners regarding these issues.Implication: Investors may also rely on such corporate governance characteristics to shape expectations about voluntary and/or mandatory information disclosure. Originality/value: Existing disclosure studies have mainly examined governance and voluntary disclosure relationship in non-listed firms. Our study, therefore, extends, as well as contributes to the existing literature by the examining the governance-disclosure nexus relating to both mandatory and voluntary disclosures in both listed and non-listed firms.

We examine the relationships among religious governance, especially Islamic governance quality (IGQ), national governance quality (NGQ), and risk management and disclosure practices (RDPs), and consequently ascertain whether NGQ has a moderating influence on the IGQ-RDPs nexus. Using one of the largest data sets relating to Islamic banks from 10 Middle East and North Africa (MENA) countries from 2006 to 2013, our findings are threefold. First, we find that RDPs are higher in banks with higher IGQ. Second, we find that RDPs are higher in banks from countries with higher NGQ. Finally, we find that NGQ has a moderating effect on the IGQ-RDPs nexus. Our findings are robust to alternative RDP measures and estimation techniques. These results imply that the quality of disclosure depends on the nature of the macro-social-level factors, such as religion that have remained largely unexplored in business and society research, and, therefore, have important implications for policy makers.

This study examines the impact of multi-layer governance mechanisms on the level of bank risk disclosure. Using a large dataset from 14 Middle East and North Africa (MENA) countries over a period of 8 years, our findings are threefold. First, our results suggest that the presence of a Sharia supervisory board is positively associated with the level of risk disclosure. Second and at the bank-level, we find that ownership structures have a positive effect on the level of risk disclosure. At the country-level, our evidence suggests that control of corruption has a positive effect on the level of bank risk disclosure. Our study is, therefore, a major departure from much of the existing accounting literature that offers new crucial insights that show that firms' disclosure choices are not mainly shaped by firm-level (internal) governance arrangements, but also country-level (external) governance and religious factors. Our findings have important implications for corporate boards, investors, regulatory authorities, standards-setters and governments relating to the development, implementation and enforcement of corporate and national governance standards.

Neural nets have become one of the most important tools using in credit scoring. Credit scoring is regarded as a core appraised tool of commercial banks during the last few decades. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the ability of neural nets, such as probabilistic neural nets and multi-layer feed-forward nets, and conventional techniques such as, discriminant analysis, probit analysis and logistic regression, in evaluating credit risk in Egyptian banks applying credit scoring models. The credit scoring task is performed on one bank's personal loans' data-set. The results so far revealed that the neural nets-models gave a better average correct classification rate than the other techniques. A one-way analysis of variance and other tests have been applied, demonstrating that there are some significant differences amongst the means of the correct classification rates, pertaining to different techniques.

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Executive pay and performance: the moderating effect of CEO power and governance structure. International Journal of Human Resource Management,(doi:10.1080/09585192.2017 This is the author's final accepted version.There may be differences between this version and the published version. You are advised to consult the publisher's version if you wish to cite from it.http://eprints.gla.ac.uk/121453/ Executive pay and performance: The moderating effect of CEO power and governance structure AbstractThis paper examines the crucial question of whether chief executive officer (CEO) power and corporate governance (CG) structure can moderate the pay-for-performance sensitivity (PPS) using a large up-to-date South African dataset. Our findings are three-fold. First, when direct links between executive pay and performance are examined, we find a positive, but relatively small PPS. Second, our results show that in a context of concentrated ownership and weak board structures; the second-tier agency conflict (director monitoring power and opportunism) is stronger than the first-tier agency problem (CEO power and self-interest). Third, additional analysis suggests that CEO power and CG structure have a moderating effect on the PPS. Specifically, we find that the PPS is higher in firms with more reputable, founding and shareholding CEOs, higher ownership by directors and institutions, and independent nomination and remuneration committees, but lower in firms with larger boards, more powerful, and long-tenured CEOs. Overall, our evidence sheds new important theoretical and empirical insights on explaining the PPS with specific focus on the predictions of the optimal contracting and managerial power hypotheses. The findings are generally robust across a raft of econometric models that control for different types of endogeneities, pay, and performance proxies.

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