Conference Agenda

This study examines the association between corporate tax avoidance and firm-level equity returns using a sample of firms from 56 countries over the period 2004–2024. We find a robust negative relationship between tax avoidance and equity returns, suggesting that the agency costs, opacity, and risk associated with aggressive tax strategies outweigh potential tax-saving benefits. We further show that corporate governance plays a moderating role. Stronger board and executive structures, proxied by larger board size, higher board compensation and greater executive gender diversity, mitigate the adverse impact of tax avoidance, consistent with enhanced monitoring and reduced information asymmetry. Further, the negative effect of tax avoidance on equity returns is more pronounced for firms operating in countries with stronger institutional protection and governance frameworks. Our results are robust to alternative specifications and endogeneity tests. Overall, the findings highlight the importance of governance mechanisms in shaping the market consequences of corporate tax behavior.

This paper examined whether improved corporate governance structure could lead to improved performance for cross-listing firms from Emerging Economies Group (EEG) countries. We found that board governance quality is not significantly associated with enhanced market valuation across multiple estimation methodologies. These challenges prevailing assumptions about the effectiveness of Anglo-American governance structures for emerging and growth economy firms. The analysis of dual-class share structures reveals that such arrangements reduce the efficacy of translating operating earnings into firm valuation, supporting the entrenchment hypothesis.

This article advances an integrated theory of global debt governance that brings together sovereign debt, corporate debt and household debt within a single analytical framework. Building on the critique of the Smithian narrative about the spontaneous emergence of markets, it argues that debt is a political legal institution constructed through a stratified architecture of contractual norms, soft law instruments, financial conditionality, case law and transnational professional networks. The paper shows how this architecture constitutes a form of "governance without government" that relocates key distributive decisions to technical and private fora, thereby generating structural deficits of democratic legitimacy, equity and transparency. Sovereign debt is examined as a laboratory of contractualisation whose logic is gradually extended to corporate debt and, ultimately, to households, contributing to the production of the homo debtor as the central subject of the contemporary financial order. Based on this integrated reading, the article highlights the limits of incremental, contract-based reforms and explores the need for transnational quasi-insolvency frameworks and responsible lending and borrowing principles capable of rebalancing the global debt regime in terms of sustainability, distributive justice and democratic control.

This study re-examines the relationship between governance mechanisms and Shariah Non-Compliance Risk (SNCR) disclosure by challenging the prevailing assumption that governance structures inherently enhance accountability. While prior literature typically models governance as a direct determinant of disclosure, empirical findings remain inconsistent. This study argues that such inconsistency reflects a deeper conceptual limitation: governance effectiveness is conditional rather than structural.

Drawing on agency, stakeholder, and institutional perspectives, and extending them through a systems-based lens, the study introduces risk governance as a moderating mechanism that shapes how governance attributes translate into disclosure outcomes. Using panel data from 22 Islamic financial institutions over the period 2016–2024, and employing panel regression techniques, the analysis examines both direct and interaction effects. SNCR disclosure is measured using a multidimensional index that captures qualitative depth, quantitative reporting, and governance responses.

The findings show that structural governance attributes, including committee size and board independence, do not consistently enhance disclosure and may, under certain conditions, weaken it. In contrast, competency-based governance demonstrates a more stable and positive association with disclosure. More importantly, risk governance significantly moderates these relationships by strengthening the effectiveness of competency-based attributes while mitigating the limitations of structural features.

The study contributes to governance and disclosure literature by demonstrating that governance mechanisms cannot be understood as isolated structural proxies but must be viewed within an enabling organisational system. By shifting the analytical focus from governance as structure to governance as system, the study offers a coherent explanation for mixed empirical findings and provides a conditional model of governance effectiveness. The findings have important implications for regulators and practitioners, indicating that structural compliance alone is insufficient to ensure meaningful accountability in environments where governance carries regulatory, ethical, and Shariah dimensions.