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This study sought to determine the effects aggressive/conservative current asset investment and financing policies have on firms' return for six manufacturing firms listed at Ghana Stock Exchange for a period of 2000-2013. Data were obtained from the annual reports of the firms and the Ghana Stock Exchange. The study adopted longitudinal explanatory non-experimental research design applied to dynamic panel ARDL framework in analyzing the data. The results revealed that the current asset investment and financing policies have highly significant positive effects on returns to equity holders in the long-run. The empirical evidence suggests that conservative current asset investment policies increase firms return while conservative financing policies yields negative returns. The study therefore would enable finance managers to be able to fashion out the appropriate working capital management policies. A firm pursuing conservative current asset investment policy should balance it with aggressive current asset financing policy in order to enhance profitability and create value for their investors.

The study sought to ascertain the level of tax planning of firms and to explore the relationship between tax planning and firms' market performance. The study used 22 non-financial companies listed on the Ghana Stock Exchange over a twelve year period from 2000. The longitudinal correlative designed was used. The results indicate that that firms' tendency to engage in intensive tax planning activities reduces when tax authorities maintain low corporate income tax rates. Secondly, tax planning has a neutral influence on firms' performance. This finding challenges the general perception that every cedi of tax savings from tax planning reflect in the pocket of investors. It is concluded that investors must institute systems to ensure tax planning benefits reflect significantly in their pockets.

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IntroductionFinancial crisis has been reported to have disastrous effects on individuals, households, firms, governments and economies at large (Reinhart and Rogoff, 2012;Yilmaz, 2010), due to the numerous unpleasant consequences it is associated with. Evidently, the global financial crisis suffered in 2008 (Klomp and De Haan, 2010), and the financial sector crisis which happened in Russia and Asia in the late 1990's (Winkler, 2010;Guloglu and İvrendi, 2010) cannot be ignored when issues of crisis related to finance are being considered. These crises caused disruption in the flow of credit to people, families, businesses, and governments. Savings, investments and consumption drastically declined, forcing firms into insolvency and an eventual shutdown (Bhanot et al., 2014). Unemployment rates rose astronomically as standard of living fell steeply (Yilmaz, 2010).The major causes of financial crisis have been attributed to failure of regulations, failure to adhere to stringent corporate governance principles and taking of uncalculated risks, among others (Roy and Kemme, 2012;Winkler, 2010;Guloglu and İvrendi, 2010;Klomp and De Haan, 2010). Collectively, all these causes have been associated with corporate governance issues (Klomp and De Haan, 2010). This is to say that weak governance systems, particularly those within financial institutions such banks, are likely to adversely influence the general operational effectiveness of financial institutions. As posited by the corporate governance theory -which states that corporate governance guides decision making issues at the board and top management levels of corporations to ensure that decisions align with the objectives of shareholders and the company (Berle and Gardiner, 1968) -when corporate governance fails to guard against aggressive risk taking, firms face disastrous financial issues which may lead to a complete shutdown (Tarraf, 2011;Kumar and Singh, 2013).Considering the unwelcoming effects of financial crisis and its attendant long term ramifications, there is the need to research into the phenomenon and bring to the fore the various causes in order for the right policies to be formulated and implemented for a sustainable financial system. However, the number of studies on financial crisis -particularly those assessing whether corporate governance influences the occurrence of financial crisis -is scanty; especially in developing economies in Africa, including Ghana (Ajakaiye, Fakiyesi and Oyinlola, 2010). It appears most of the empirical studies considering corporate governance and financial crisis were carried out in the developed countries (Roy and Kemme, 2012;Winkler, 2010;Guloglu and İvrendi, 2010;Klomp and De Haan, 2010). Even that, many of them only cited corporate governance as one of the major causes of financial crisis (Ajakaiye et al., 2010) but not necessarily studying the kind of possible relationship that might exist between corporate governance and occurrence of financial crisis. This has left a huge gap in literature as far as the relationships...