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This paper aims to examine whether the characteristics of boards are more important in determining dividend policy than management characteristics. The authors show that as the final declarers of dividend policy is a firm’s board, the composition of a firm’s board significantly subsumes the effect of management characteristics that may also influence dividend policy.

Using the dividend declaration dummy variable, the authors run a fixed effect logistic regression of the dividend indicator on board characteristics, and managerial characteristics with firm level controls, year effects and industry effects while clustering standard errors at the firm level. For dividend yield variable which is censored at zero, they use a fixed effect Tobit regression.

The results of the study show that board characteristics such as average age, female presence and size have a strong positive significant effect, whereas board independent chair and voting right of directors have a negative significant effect on the likelihood of dividend declaration. For dividend yields, the results suggest that the presence of directors with financial expertise and the board size are the main influencers of dividend policy. Managerial characteristics are subsumed by director characteristics for determining dividend policy. The results overall support the evidence on the monitoring role of boards on management.

The originality and value of this study lies in the approach of including a comprehensive number of board characteristics unlike previous studies which makes the study of the influence of board composition on dividends more encompassing.

Post-Sarbanes Oxley Act (SOX), the audit committee has been empowered greatly to play a central role in the corporate governance of firms. Embedded in agency theory, this study aims to examine the effect of the audit committee on the likelihood by firms to pay dividends.

The study population is US firms in the Institutional Shareholder Services (ISS) database from 2007 to 2018. The authors apply the multivariate logit fixed-effect regression for the analyses after conducting the appropriate statistical tests.

From the results of the research model, the authors find that there is a positive relationship between the size and gender diversity of the audit committee and the propensity to pay dividends suggesting that a larger audit committee with substantial women representation improve the information environment in firms leading to higher dividend distribution. The extent of busyness of the audit committee impacts negatively on the propensity to pay dividends. The results are driven by high-performing firms and not driven by specific levels of firm size.

The findings of the study give impetus to the audit committee as an important component of the corporate governance mechanism that advances the interest of stakeholders. Thus, efforts that seeks to promote the audit committee’s resourcefulness must be embraced by all stakeholders.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first to focus on audit committee and dividend payout policy of US firms post-SOX. The study demonstrates how the audit committee characteristics including its size, gender diversity and busyness affect dividend policy by mitigating information asymmetry problems.

This paper aims to show that information asymmetry plays a vital role in the post-M&A performance-time until deal completion nexus. The findings are that the due diligence hypothesis and the overdue hypothesis proposed and tested in Thompson and Kim (2020) are influenced by the information asymmetry of the target during the negotiation process. Thus, mergers that involve more opaque targets that take a shorter time to close perform better, whereas those that take too long to close experience poor post-M&A performance. Conversely, there is no such effect when the mergers involve targets that are transparent and not plagued with large information asymmetry problems. These results hold for the short-term supporting the evidence that information asymmetry problems are severe before the merger is consummated and become attenuated post-merger.

This paper aims to investigate the relationship between sustainability reporting and firm value, and subsequently, ascertains the moderating effect of assurance and the type of assurer on the sustainability reporting–firm value nexus.

The study is based on sample firms from the Johannesburg Stock Exchange (JSE) in South Africa. The fixed‐effect panel data analysis method is used to estimate the coefficients of the variables.

A significant positive relationship is found between sustainability reporting and firm value. The results also suggest that sustainability assurance has significant explanatory power on firm value. Furthermore, the authors found that the market is unable to distinguish between sustainability assurance services provided by Big 4 audit firms and specialist consultant firms.

The authors expect managers will see sustainability reporting and assurance as a business strategy with incremental market value. The study should also serve as a reference for stakeholders engaged in the advocacy for the adoption of sustainability assurance practices on the JSE and other emerging markets.

The study finds that the South African market rewards firms that purchase third-party assurance to guarantee the integrity of their corporate social responsibility reports. This understanding could help encourage more firms to embrace the concept of sustainability assurance.

The study offers a first-hand information on how market participants in Johannesburg, an emerging economy, view sustainability assurance and the services provided by the different assurers.

This paper investigates a retrospective on the Journal of Derivatives and Quantitative Studies (JDQS) on its 30th anniversary based on bibliometric. JDQSs yearly publications, citations, impact factors, and centrality indices grew up in early 2010s, and diminished in 2020. Keyword network analysis reveals the JDQS's main keywords including behavioral finance, implied volatility, information asymmetry, price discovery, KOSPI200 futures, volatility, and KOSPI200 options. Citations of JDQS articles are mainly driven by article age, demeaned age squared, conference, nonacademic authors and language. In comparison between number of views and downloads for JDQS articles, we find that recent changes in publisher and editorial and publishing policies have increased visibility of JDQS.