Browsing by Author "Saeed, Abubakr"
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Item Open Access Political connections and corporate financial decision making(Springer, 2018-11-16) Belghitar, Yacine; Clark, Ephraim; Saeed, AbubakrThis paper investigates whether and how political connections influence managerial financial decisions. Our study reveals that those firms that have a politician on its board of directors are highly leveraged, use more long-term debt, hold large excess cash and are associated with low quality financial reporting compared to their non-connected counterparts. These effects escalate with the strength of the connected politician and whether he or his party is in power. The winning party effect is observed to be stronger than victory by the politician himself. Overall, our paper provides strong evidence that political connection is a two-edged sword. It is indeed a valuable resource for connected firms, but it comes at a cost of higher agency problems.Item Open Access Political connections and corporate performance: evidence from Pakistan(Wiley, 2019-03-24) Saeed, Abubakr; Belghitar, Yacine; Clark, EphraimThis study seeks to understand how political connections affect firm performance. Using a hand‐collected dataset of Pakistani firms from 2008–2014, our firm fixed effects and Heckman two‐stage regression results show that connected firms outperform those without political ties. Moreover, we show channels through which political benefits are realized in terms of greater access to debt, lower financing costs and lower tax rates. These benefits are found to be particularly large when firms are connected to politicians who held political positions most recently and firms connected through their owners. Finally, we do not find evidence for differences in political favours across regulated and unregulated industriesItem Open Access Read between the lines: board gender diversity, family ownership, and risk‐taking in Indian high‐tech firms(Wiley, 2019-11-08) Saeed, Abubakr; Mukarram, Syed Shafqat; Belghitar, YacineThis article examines the effect of board gender diversity on firm risk‐taking level. Drawing on the contingency framework, we contend that the influence of women executives on firm risk‐taking depends largely on the organizational context of the firm such as the industry in which it operates. To investigate this proposition, we compare the influence of board gender diversity on firm risk‐taking level in Indian high‐tech and in non‐high‐tech sectors. Our findings indicate that female executives operating in high‐tech sectors take more risk than their counterparts female executives who operate in non‐high sector. Interestingly, our analysis also reveals that family ownership negatively moderates the impact of female executives on risk‐taking in high‐tech firms. In additional analysis, we find that female executives exert a positive impact on firm performance only in high‐tech sector. This suggests that the influence of female executives on firm outcomes is not always straightforward.