Search results

This study aims to investigate the potential link between prior-year banking performance and a change in the number of board of directors’ meetings in the current year and understand how changes in board meetings might impact subsequent bank performance.

The sample is drawn from 42 banks in Bangladesh from 2011 to 2019, and the data are analyzed using multivariate regressions. Potential endogeneity concerns are addressed using the entropy balance matching approach.

This study presents two key findings: first, the change in the number of board meetings in a year is influenced by bank performance in the last year, where poor performance leads to more meetings, and second, an increase in the number of board meetings contributes to enhanced bank performance.

This is one of the few studies to explore the reasons behind changes in the board of directors’ meeting behavior and whether such changes benefit banks. The results highlight that a decline in bank performance prompts the board to meet more often, and this proactive response helps banks overcome the poor performance problem. Thus, this study underscores the significance of the board’s adaptive behavior in tailoring the number of meetings according to the bank’s specific circumstances.

The recent Covid-19 crisis has exposed the limitations of inventory leanness (i.e. keeping fewer inventories than expected), leading its followers to question whether it is the end of inventory leanness. This study aims to answer that question from a financial perspective.

This study considers 2019, 2020 and 2021 as the pre-, during- and post-Covid periods, respectively, and compares the financial performance and risks of firms that followed a lean inventory strategy (lean firms) to those that do not (non-lean firms). The sample is drawn from manufacturing firms in the USA, and the data are analyzed using univariate tools (such as a t-test) and multivariate regressions.

The results show that the financial performance of lean firms was better than that of non-lean firms under normal operating conditions in 2019, which continued to sustain during the crisis and post-crisis operating conditions in 2020 and 2021, respectively. Lean firms were also less risky than non-lean firms, except for in 2020, where they were equally risky.

A financial perspective suggests that managers of lean firms who might be thinking of changing over to a non-lean or more conservative strategy in the post-Covid era in relation to their firms' level of inventories do not need to do so unless otherwise required.

This is the very first study that shows the implications of inventory leanness for firms across three operating conditions: pre-crisis (normal business condition), crisis (abnormal business condition) and post-crisis (sub-normal business condition).