No abstract

We investigate the impact of organizational religiosity on the earnings quality of listed banks in the Middle East and North Africa region. We analyze Islamic banking institutions, which operate within strict religious norms and extended accountability constraints, and compare them with their conventional counterparts during 2008-2013.We find that Islamic banks are less likely to manage earnings and that they adopt more conservative accounting policies. Based on these findings, we argue that religious norms and moral accountability constraints in these organizations have a significant impact on financial reporting quality and agency costs, which has implications for both regulators and market participants.

This study examines the impact of board busyness (i.e., multiple directorships of outside board members) on the performance and financial stability of banks in a dual banking system (Islamic and conventional). We consider banks from 14 countries for the period 2010-2015. The results provide strong evidence that conventional banks with busy boards exhibit high bank performance (i.e., high profitability and low cost to income) and greater financial stability (i.e., low insolvency risk, credit risk, liquidity risk, asset risk, and operational risk). These findings are in line with the reputation hypothesis, which asserts that the expertise and connections of busy outside directors lead to better decision making, more efficient resource utilisation and more effective monitoring. In contrast, Islamic banks' performance and stability are adversely affected by the presence of busy board members, with Islamic banks show low profitability, high cost to income and high risk-taking. This result might be attributed to the complex governance structure of Islamic banks and the uniqueness of their financial products, which require additional effective monitoring.

This study examines whether firms can influence their cost of equity (COE) by broadly disseminating their carbon information over Twitter. We study firms' dissemination decisions of carbon information by developing a comprehensive measure of carbon information that a firm makes onTwitter, referred to as iCarbon. Using a sample of 1,737 firmyear observations for 584 nonfinancial firms with aTwitter account and listed on the U.S. NASDAQ stock exchange over the period 2009-2015, we find that iCarbon is significantly and negatively associated with COE. Our results are consistent after determining the effect of Bloomberg's environmental and environmental, social, and governance disclosure. The findings also hold when using alternative measures of COE and iCarbon.

The outcome of carbon disclosure, the importance of which has grown remarkably in recent years to become a strategic decision-making issue for organisations in today's competitive environment, is a subject of lively debate but remains under-researched in the environmental accounting literature. This study is motivated by this research