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.

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