This paper analyzes governance and ownership structure and their impacts on dividend policy in emerging markets during financial crises. Our results provide strong evidence of the significant role of corporate ownership structure and board characteristics in explaining the behavior of dividend policy mainly during crisis periods. We show that firms with a higher proportion of institutional shareholders pursue higher dividend payout ratios. This study is of particular interest for business managers in their choice of strategies to be adopted in respect for dividend policy during crisis periods.

This paper examines the factors influencing the capital adequacy ratio (CAR) of foreign banks. We test whether the CAR of subsidiaries and branches in developed and developing countries depends on the same factors. We use data from 310 subsidiaries and 265 branches to test the impact of the parent banks' fundamentals on subsidiaries' and branches' capital ratios. We also study how the economic condition and regulatory environment in a bank's home country determine foreign banks' CAR. Our results provide strong evidence that the CAR of subsidiaries and branches operating in developing and developed countries do not depend on the same set of explanatory factors. We also find that the regulatory framework of a parent bank's home country affects the capitalization of its foreign subsidiaries in the host countries. Finally, we show that specific variables of the parent bank have a stronger effect for foreign banks highly related to the interbank market.

Abstract. This paper studies bank distress in MENA countries and addresses the question of whether mergers are commonly considered as a solution for resolving individual bank distress. Both specific bank levels and macro variables are deployed to predict banking distress. In line with other recent papers, we challenge the view that specific bank indicators such as CAMEL category and bank size are significant determinants of bank distress. Our findings indicate that monetary policy indicators do not really affect bank distress in MENA countries. Overall, we suggest that bank capitalization and regulatory supervision needs to be given enough consideration to avoid individual distress in the banking sector. Our empirical study shows that 67% of the distressed banks in our sample are involved in merger transactions and that poor financial status systematically increases the likelihood of a bank being involved in a merger. Distressed state-owned banks and large-sized banks are less likely to be a target in a merger transaction. However, global economic conditions do not affect the decision of distressed banks to initiate a merger policy.JEL: G21, G33, G35, G38.