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The purpose of this study is to evaluate the real estate investment performance portfolio decision-making of the insurance firms by the National Housing Fund (NHF) Act in reducing the housing deficit in Nigeria. The insurance companies' gross premium, real estate investment and return on investment trends for the period 2014–2019 were evaluated, to determine the extent of their investment in real estate in Nigeria, this ought to have reduced the shortfall in housing.

Both primary and secondary sources were used. Cronbach’s alpha was used for testing the reliability. The Friedman mean rank with Chi-square was used for different types of real estate investment properties and for reasons for investing in real estate by insurance companies in Nigeria. The test for normality was conducted using the Shapiro–Wilk and Spearman correlation for the significance. The percentage and the data envelopment analysis frontier model were used for measuring performance and efficiency.

The results showed that the majority of real estate investments made by insurance companies were in commercial and land buying and reselling and that their performance was below average. However, their motivation for investing is not toward the NHF Act but rather for diversification and increasing their capital.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is one of the first studies in Nigeria that looked at how well insurance firms have performed investing in real estate as required by the NHF Act. However, the new Act, the National Housing Fund (Establishment) Act of 2018 which was put on hold due to flaws, affected data availability beyond 2019.

This study aims to address the critical need for innovative financing solutions in the global housing sector, focusing specifically on Malaysia’s distinct housing finance system encompassing both conventional and Islamic loans. The primary objective is to develop a transformative housing finance model that addresses affordability challenges and reshapes the Malaysian housing landscape.

The study presents an alternate housing finance model for Malaysia, integrating lower monthly payments and reduced household debt. Key variables include house price appreciation rates, interest rates, initial guarantee fees and loan-to-value ratios. Inspired by the Help to Buy (HTB) scheme, the model aligns with proven global initiatives for enhanced affordability, balancing payment amounts, loan interest rates and acceptable price thresholds.

The study’s findings promise to address affordability disparities and reshape Malaysia’s housing finance landscape. The emphasis is on introducing a structured repayment plan that offers a sustainable path to homeownership, particularly for low-income families. Incorporating the future value adaptation concept, inspired by reverse mortgages and Islamic finance, enhances adaptability, ensuring long-term sustainability despite economic shifts.

The proposed model promotes widespread access to homeownership, offering practical solutions for policymakers to improve affordability, prompting adaptable risk management strategies for financial institutions and empowering potential homebuyers with increased flexibility.

The study introduces a transformative housing finance model for Malaysia, merging elements from reverse mortgages, Islamic finance and the HTB scheme, offering potential applicability to similar systems globally.

The study on how macroeconomic factors affect non-performing loans (NPLs) have not been focussed on property loans, which had been amongst the largest contributor of NPLs in many countries. At the same time, whilst there are many studies that focusses on NPLs during the recession and financial crises, not many studies focus on how macroeconomic factors affect property NPLs in a recovering economic environment. The purpose of this study seeks to fill the gap by analysing the relationships between gross domestic product (GDP), interest rates, income, foreign direct investments (FDI), housing prices and taxes on property NPLs with Malaysia as a case study in which NPLs rose for the first time after declining for almost a decade since the 2008–2009 global financial crisis. This study aims to understand the dynamics and direction of causation in relationships.

The author uses the auto regressive distribution lag analysis between the independent variables of GDP, interest rates, housing prices, service taxes, percapita income and FDI affecting the dependent variable of property NPLs from 2009 to 2017, during a unique period of recovering economic environment where NPLs rose for the first time in almost a decade of decline.

This study found that interest rates, housing prices, income, GDP and service taxes were found to possess long cause effects and long run elasticity with NPLs. At the same time, interest rates were found to implicate property NPLs significantly in longer periods, followed by GDP, housing prices, service taxes and income. FDIs were found to be insignificantly negative in implicating property NPLs in the long run.

This paper allows policymakers to understand the dynamic implications of crucial macroeconomic factors in affecting NPLs so that appropriate strategic monetary policies could be formulated towards addressing them. More focus shall be given to addressing the long term implications of these factors on NPLs.

Appropriate strategic monetary policy making can be channelled towards addressing these factors via understanding the short and long term implications of macroeconomic variables on property NPLs. Policymakers can take note of the long cause effects and long run elasticity of average interest rates, housing prices, income levels, GDP and service taxes with property NPLs so that appropriate long term policies can be addressed to control the rise of property NPLs in the country. At the same time, priority should be given towards strengthening of the GDP of the country due to its strongest impact in long term effects with reduction of NPLs in the country.

The insights from the present study suggest policymakers interested in bringing stability in the real estate finance system need to account for the various macroeconomic variables found in this study.

The paper is novel on at least two dimensions. First, this study involves focussing on a unique period of recovering economic environment where NPLs rose for the first time after a decade of decline since recovering from the 2008–2009 global financial crisis. At the same time, this study focusses on property NPLs, which is unique in nature compared to general NPLs. This study had enabled policymakers to better understand the dynamic implications of several macroeconomic variables affecting property NPLs and assist them in strategic monetary policy making.

Higher education management institutions play a vibrant role in imparting managerial skills to the students to face the corporate world. Performance evaluation of such institutions is mandate to ensure the outcome quality. To establish this, the present research explored the critical performance indicators of management institutions using the balanced scorecard (BSC) approach.

This research explored the critical performance indicators of public, private and standalone management institutions in India. Data were collected from the representative sample of all the stakeholders in those management institutions. A specific vision was created and a systematic procedure was employed to arrive at the objectives, measures and metrics of the scorecard specific to the vision. Confirmatory factor analysis was used to perform analysis on the collected data. For the objectives and measures that evolved from confirmatory factor analysis, metrics were formulated based on the expert opinion.

The study resulted in 16 objectives, 46 measures and 54 metrics encompassing all the four perspectives of BSC. This paper has contributed a concrete, concise, comprehensive and context specific framework.

The nature of the BSC framework paves the way for continuous assessment and eventually helps the institutions to attain sustainable growth. This research contributes to the literature of balanced scorecard and also to the performance assessment of the management institutions.

BSC-based benchmarking is a unique contribution to the academia of management education to precisely measure the performance of institutions. The model comprehensively includes the indicators from all the perspectives of stakeholders in terms of objectives, measures and metrics, thus proposing a holistic assessment.

Corporate gift-giving and hospitality are some of the high-risk areas for corruption. This paper aims to see comparisons between the Malaysian Ministerial Guidelines and the UK Guidance and to analyse whether the guideline in Malaysia is adequate in dealing with corporate gift-giving and hospitality.

The methodology used in this paper is qualitative research which is based on data collection through online searches, legal databases, information obtained from articles, books, statutes and related government publications.

The findings show that the statutory guideline in Malaysia is immature, still not adequate, and lacks detailed regulations in determining gifts and hospitality as corruption (unclear boundary), as compared to the UK law which is more detailed.

This paper explains on comparison of corporate gift giving and hospitality practise in Malaysia and the UK based on the statutory guidelines.

The purpose of this research is to present an integrated methodological framework to aid in performance stewardship of management institutions according to their strategies based on a holistic evaluation encompassing social, economic and environmental dimensions.

A Mamdani fuzzy inference system (FIS) approach was adopted to design the quantitative models with respect to balanced scorecard (BSC) perspectives to demonstrate dynamic capability. Individual models were developed for each perspective of BSC using Mamdani FIS. Data was collected from subject matter experts in management education.

The proposed methodology is able to successfully compute the scores for each perspective. Effective placement, teaching learning process, faculty development and systematic feedback from the stakeholders were found to be the key drivers for revenue generation. The model is validated as the results were well accepted by the head of the institution after implementation.

The model resulting from this study will assist the institution to cyclically assess its performance, thus enabling continuous improvement. The strategy map provides the causality of the objectives across the four perspectives to aid the practitioners to better strategize. Also this study contributes to the literature of BSC as well to the applications of multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) techniques.

Mamdani FIS integrated BSC model is a significant contribution to the academia of management education to quantitatively compute the performance of institutions. This quantified model reduces the ambiguity for practitioners to decide the performance levels for each metric and the priorities of metrics.

This study investigates the influence of six interrelated contextual factors, namely organisational structure, quality of information technology, business strategy in terms of deliberate strategy-formulation, market orientation, market competition and perceived environmental uncertainty (PEU), on the usage intensity of innovative management accounting techniques commonly referred to as strategic management accounting (SMA); the impact of SMA usage on competitive advantage; and the moderating influence of the contextual factors on the relationship between SMA usage and competitive advantage.

Survey data were obtained through a structured questionnaire from publicly listed manufacturing companies on the main board of the Nigerian Stock Exchange (NSE). Ordinary least squares (OLS) regression and moderated regression were used to analyse data. Both exploratory factor analysis (EFA) and confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) were used to examine the validity and reliability of variables as first and second order of analysis. Structural equation modelling (SEM) (maximum likelihood estimation method) was applied to assess the robustness of result.

Market orientation and deliberate strategy-formulation emerged as significant determinants of SMA usage intensity. Although there is a significant relationship between SMA usage and competitive advantage, the strength of the relationship is moderate. Organisational structure, deliberate strategy-formulation and PEU significantly moderate the relationship between SMA usage and competitive advantage.

The emergence of deliberate strategy-formulation, as both a significant predictor of SMA usage intensity and as the strongest moderator of the relationship between SMA usage and competitive advantage, establish that it is organisations that take a proactive approach to strategy issues that may derive the most benefit from SMA utilisation.

The result from this study brings to fore the need to involve management accountants in strategy-formulation and implementation in order to leverage their competence in deploying SMA techniques to enhance organisational competitiveness.

The current study is the first, to the researcher's knowledge, to specifically examine interrelated contextual factors distinctively affecting SMA usage and organisational competitiveness in a developing country. Whilst these six factors have been stressed as important determinants of the adoption of innovative management accounting techniques, the study provides empirical evidence on the extent to which they exert on SMA. The study presents empirical evidence on the relevance of market orientation—a construct which has surprisingly received little research attention in management accounting literature—as a variable which could affect the adoption of management accounting innovation.

Although markets are intensely social, stock markets are peculiar in that they are normatively anonymous spaces. Anonymity is a difficult-to-achieve social accomplishment in which material identity information is successfully stripped from participants. The academic literature is conflicted regarding the degree to which equity markets are anonymous and how this influences traders’ behavior.

Based on focused, tape-recorded ethnographic interviews, this chapter investigates the work practices of professional investors and brokers to describe the conditions under which brokers veil or reveal investors’ identities to their competitors, and thereby shed light on how anonymity is socially produced (or eroded) in global stock markets.

The social structure of brokered financial markets places brokers in the awkward situation of sitting in an information-poor structural location for so-called “fundamental information” while being paid to share information with professional investors who sit in an information-rich structural location. A resolution to this material and social dilemma is that brokers can erode the market’s anonymity by gifting identity information (“order flow”) – the previous, prospective, or pending trades of their clients’ competitors – thereby providing traders a competitive advantage. They share identity information in three types of performances: transparent relationships, masked relationships, and the transformation of illicit material identity information into licit and sharable “fundamental” information. Each performance partly erodes transaction-level and market-level anonymity while simultaneously partially supporting anonymity.

Laws and regulations requiring brokers’ confidentiality of their clients’ trades are easily and systematically eluded. Policy makers and regulators may opt to respond by increasing surveillance and mechanization of brokers’ work so as to promote a normatively anonymous market. Alternatively, they may opt to question the value of promoting and policing anonymity in financial markets by revising insider trading regulations.

Even well-regulated markets are semi-anonymous spaces due to the systematic exposure of investors’ identities to competitors by their shared brokers on a daily basis. This finding provides an additional explanation for how professional investors can imitate one another (“herd”) as well as why subpopulations of investors often trade so similarly to one another.

This study aims to investigate four internal (organisational structure, quality of information technology, business strategy and market orientation) and two external (competition intensity and perceived environmental uncertainty) contextual factors affecting the use of production planning and control accounting techniques (PPC), as well as the impact of PPC usage on organisational competitiveness.

Seven major PPC techniques were investigated, namely: attribute costing, lifecycle costing, quality costing, target costing, value-chain costing, activity-based costing and activity-based management. By deploying a multi-informant strategy, a structured questionnaire was used to gather survey data from 129 senior accounting, finance and production personnel of publicly quoted manufacturing companies in Nigeria.

The results, using structural equation modelling, show that market orientation is the strongest determinant of PPC usage. The inability of competition intensity and perceived environmental uncertainty to notably affect PPC usage suggests that external environmental pressure to use PPC is weak. Although PPC can engender organisational competitiveness, their interactive usage yields optimal results.

The study contributes to knowledge by: (i) presenting evidence that although PPC techniques can engender organisational competitiveness, it is their interactive usage that yields optimal results; (ii) empirically demonstrating that contextual factors influence PPC usage in line with the contingency theory; and (iii) validating the diffusion of innovation theory that organisations will typically deploy PPC techniques because of their relative advantage of improving organisational competitiveness.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the customers’ perception regarding the current shari’ah issues of Islamic banks in Malaysia. Specifically, the study attempts to examine the awareness of the current criticisms of the main shari’ah issues in Islamic finance, and the perception of the selected customers towards these criticisms.

The study uses a qualitative approach to understand in detail the customers’ perception and experiences about shari’ah compliance of Islamic banks. Semi-structured interview is used with ten Islamic banks’ customers in Malaysia. The study also used phenomenological techniques to analyse the data.

The findings revealed that the interviewees have considerable exposure and awareness of the current criticisms of the shari’ah compliance of Islamic banks.

This research is the first to study the shari’ah issues of Islamic banks in Malaysia from the customers’ perspective, by using a qualitative research approach. The findings of this study are of original importance, because they unveil the customers’ experience in an area that has been severely looked at from the professional and experts’ point of view only.