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This study aims to investigate the impact of energy access on foreign direct investment (FDI) in an emerging market.

The study uses the two-stage least square instrumental variables estimation approach to compute the parameters of the model to account for any potential endogeneity and time persistence in energy access.

The results show that energy access significantly influences FDI inflows in Ghana. The results of the study also revealed that natural resources and macroeconomic variables such as real interest rate, gross domestic product growth rate are significant determinants of FDI inflows in Ghana.

The practical implication of this study is that there is a need for energy sector policy reforms in Ghana that would guarantee a secured and continued supply of energy to enhance energy access to boost FDI. Ghana should aim for a cost-effective, stable and environmentally friendly source of energy as an alternative to hydro energy as the main source of its power generation to promote FDI. Also, Ghana should initiate and implement policies aimed at creating an enabling and stable macroeconomic environment, as macroeconomic factors in this study are found to be drivers of FDI.

This study provides firsthand information on energy access and FDI from the Ghanaian perspective.

This study purposely re‐examine the mortgage–finance nexus in Africa.

This study adopted a panel data set spanning over the period 1995–2017 by using system generalized method of moments (GMM) dynamic pooled estimator developed by Arellano and Bond (1991) and Arellano and Bover (1995) involving 51 African countries.

The findings discovered that financial development (bank asset) affects mortgage development positively and this effect is highly significant while broad money supply as a measure of financial development impedes mortgage development in Africa. Furthermore, with the introduction of the quadratic term, broad money supply established a U-shaped relationship with mortgage financing indicating that more money in circulation facilitates mortgage development in Africa. However, the shape of the other variables depends largely on the nature of proxy used.

This study is unique in many aspects. First, examining the extant literature on the financial development and mortgage financing nexus, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, no study is cited at the African level with this relationship. Secondly is the empirical model, as it used the system GMM dynamic pooled estimator developed by Arellano and Bond (1991) and Arellano and Bover (1995) to establish whether there is any effect of finance–mortgage nexus.

The paper aims to investigate empirically the impact of corporate social responsibility (CSR) on financial performance in South African listed firms.

The paper uses panel corrected standard errors to estimate the effect of CSR on firm financial performance and thus addresses contemporaneous cross-correlations across the panel cross sections. The study uses a broad base measure of CSR created by the Public Investment Corporation data set and the combination of accounting and economic means of measuring firm financial performance.

CSR is found to have a strong positive impact on firm financial performance in South Africa. When CSR is decomposed further into its major components, governance performance positively impacts a firm’s financial performance with no evidence of any relationship between social components and firm performance and between environmental components and firm performance. The positive impact of CSR on firm performance is greater in big firms. At the industry level, CSR is noticed to impact positively on financial performance in the extractive industry via good governance and responsible environmental behaviors. It however has no impact on firm performance in the financial sector.

The results should be interpreted with caution and some limitations. Due to the limiting nature of the Public Investment Corporation data set (the survey was carried out on selected firms on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange for three years spanning from 2011 to 2013). This resulted in a sample of 56 firms. It is therefore very problematic to generalize the findings to a larger population over a long period of time. This is more limiting especially on individual sector studies where the sample has further shrunk to a smaller sample. As a result of the smaller sample size, the authors were unable to explore some other sectors which could have given more revealing findings. The authors recommend that future research should explore other data sets or use primary data approach that can allow for more sample size and elongated time period for a more holistic view and for easy generalization of the findings. The authors also identify an important lacuna necessitating further research effort. It would be interesting to empirically examine the threshold point of firms’ size beyond which CSR damages firms’ performance. Knowledge of this will guide managers of firms in their strategic CSR decision.

This study does not only serve as a reference work for subsequent investigations into the impact of CSR on firm performance in sub-Saharan Africa but also serves as a guide to policymakers on the financial impact of CSR adoption.

This study is one of the pioneering works that comprehensively examines the effect of CSR on financial performance amongst South African firms via size and sector and also controls for contemporaneous cross-correlation effects from the firms in the panel set.