Saturday, October 28, 2017

Vicky Noon Educational Foundation Oxford Scholarships for Pakistani Students in UK, 2018

The Vicky Noon Educational Foundation is offering scholarships for Pakistani students to pursue full or part-time master’s or DPhil course at the University of Oxford. The size and duration of awards vary according to each scholar’s circumstances. Scholarships will be awarded on the basis of academic merit, financial need and the potential social contribution made by the applicant on their return to Pakistan.

for details: 

Tuesday, July 4, 2017

Earnings Quality: A Missing Link between Corporate Governance and Firm Value

by: Khalid Latif, Arshad Ali Bhatti, Abdul Raheman
The existing literature concerning governance-value relationship is inconclusive as it assumes that the association is direct. A theoretical argument suggests that the effective corporate governance reduces the information asymmetry through better financial reporting quality. This serves as a tool to reduce this information risk. Following the argument, our study is an attempt to investigate the mediating role of earnings quality, a measure of financial reporting quality, in governance-value association. For estimation, we use a panel data of 214 non-financial listed firms in Pakistan for the period 2003-2014 and employ one-way random effect estimator for the SUR system, as suggested by Biørn (2004). Our findings show that the corporate governance effectively improves the earnings quality and value of the firm, which approves the monitoring role. Moreover, earnings quality contributes positively in maximizing the value of the firm and the results demonstrate that better earnings quality partially mediates the governance-value association. It is concluded that corporate governance not only improves the value of the firm directly, but also indirectly through the channel of earnings quality.



Friday, June 9, 2017

Inflation, Output Growth and Macroeconomic Uncertainties in Pakistan and India

By: Rasul, S., Bhatti, A. A. Khan, H. & Jabeen, M.
This paper examines the dynamic relationships among inflation, output growth and their uncertainties for Pakistan and India for the period 1982-M4 to 2012-M12. We use various GARCH models to estimate the conditional variances that are used as proxies for the uncertainties of inflation and output growth. Finally, we use the bi-variate ARMA (p,q)-GARCH-M (1,1) models with diagonal BEKK specification to find the twelve causal relationships among inflation, output growth and their uncertainties. Our evidence supports the number of important conclusions. Firstly, we find that Friedman (1977) hypothesis, i.e., inflation leads to increase the inflation uncertainty is not supported in both Pakistan and India. Secondly, Cukierman-Meltzer (1986) hypothesis is accepted in Pakistan and Holland (1995) hypothesis is accepted in India. Thirdly, Black (1987) hypothesis is accepted in Pakistan and Deveraux (1989) hypothesis is accepted in India. We also find the strong relationship that higher output growth reduces the inflation in both India and Pakistan. We also conclude that the policy makers of both countries may take measures to reduce inflation rate because output growth is inversely related to inflation and the prevailing uncertainty in the economy.