The Sarbanes-Oxley Act made audit committees directly responsible for the appointment, compensation, and supervision of companies' auditors. Limited research in the auditor selection process and PCAOB inspections suggest that managers, not audit committees, may still be selecting the auditors,...

This paper makes a detailed comparison of two major financial services in Singapore: life insurance and stockbrokerage. Relationships of perceptions and expectations of service quality, mean service adequacy (MSA) and mean service superiority (MSS) with service satisfaction and loyalty are...

With an increasingly open economic condition in Thailand, insurance firms exposed to competition should improve efficiency to ensure their survival. This paper examines the cost efficiency and its relationship with profitability of life insurance firms: Cobb-Douglas stochastic cost frontier...

This paper re-examines the evidence on how the listing of options impacts on underlying stock’s volatility by taking into consideration the possible presence of a learning effect, along with the impact of the very endogenous nature of the options listing decision itself. Our analyses are...

ENGLISH ABSTRACT: Development Finance Institutions (DFIs) in South Africa can enhance their role as prime vehicles for the Government to achieve the social objectives of meeting the millennium goals. This can be achieved by ensuring that higher ratios of resources available to the DFIs are...

Financial institutions invest in financial securities like equities, options andgovernment bonds. Two measures, namely return and risk, are associated witheach investment position. Return is a measure of the profit or loss of theinvestment, whilst risk is defined as the uncertainty about...

The level of poverty in Namibia is relatively high. Access to finance is cited as one of factors hampering economic growth and poverty alleviation. Microfinance is seen as one of the effective tools that can address poverty alleviation by engaging the poor in sustainable economic activities....

In the microfinance discourse, sustainability can relate to organisational, managerial and financial aspects. However, what is in vogue in mainstream analysis is the financial sustainability of MFIs throughout the world, especially in Africa, Asia and Latin America. What has attracted...

The Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) under the Kyoto Protocol to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) enables industrialized countries to meet a part of their emission reduction requirements through purchase of emission reduction credits from projects in developing countries....