Purpose Although the Social Progress Index offers a thorough overview of the top-ranked countries with a highly developed social performance, it assigns the same weight to all component scores, implying that each component has identical and independent contribution to the SPI. By removing these...

Purpose This paper aims to examine the conditional and nonlinear relationship between price-earnings (P/E) ratio and payout ratio. A common finding of previous studies using linear regression model is that the P/E ratio is positively related to the dividend payout ratio. However, none of them...

Purpose A large number of empirical studies investigate the determinants of price-earnings (P/E) ratio by focusing on fundamental factors. However, there has been an increasing concern that stock valuation is also driven by investor sentiment. This paper aims to extend the existing literature by...

Purpose – In an introductory finance course, business school students often report difficulty in dealing with several variables and regression equations in testing the forward market efficiency and its relevant hypotheses: forward rate unbiasedness, rational expectations, risk neutrality and...

Purpose – Despite their important role for small and medium-sized enterprise (SME) policy reform, the individual scores of the ten categories of business regulations in the World Bank’s Doing Business report are often overshadowed by the equal-weighted overall score and ease of doing...

Purpose – Most companies rarely work on sustainable development as a whole, which includes environmental, social, governance, and economic pillars. The purpose of this paper is to explore causal relationships between pillar scores and overall score of sustainability and identify the most...