A CLEARER ROLE IN THE MIDDLE EAST

China lays out its vision for increased cooperation in the regionOn January 13,China published its first Arab policy paper,reaffirming the strategic significance that it attaches to the region.The release of this important document and the recent state visits of Chinese President Xi Jinping to Saudi Arabia,Egypt and Iran coincided with the 60th anniversary of Sino-Arab diplomatic relations and present the role that     

The association between risk disclosure and firm characteristics: a meta-analysis

The empirical literature on the determinants of risk disclosures offers mixed results. This complicates efforts among stakeholders to understand the factors affecting firms’ decision to report risk information. The aim of our paper is to analyze the findings of 42 empirical studies using a meta-analysis technique. We examine whether differences in the findings are attributable to random error or due to legal and institutional systems, uncertainty avoidance, disclosure regime (mandatory vs. voluntary), industry types, and the proxies used to measure corporate characteristics. We find that all moderators affect the relationship between corporate size and risk reporting. Legal system, disclosure regime, industry types, and leverage ratio measurement moderate the association between leverage ratio and risk disclosure. Industry types and uncertainty-avoidance level affect the relationship between profitability and risk disclosure. Finally, the association between risk factor and risk disclosure is moderated by industry types. We discuss the implications of our findings and offer suggestions for future research.     

On the Instability of Tunisian Money Demand: Some Empirical Issues with Structural Breaks

This paper focuses on the causes of instability of money demand in Tunisia between 1973 and 2013. It has been argued that the main explanatory factors of money demand are national income, monetary market rate and exchange rate. We tested Ambler and McKinnon hypothesis (1985), which assumes that instability is explained by the absence of the nominal exchange rate in the specification of money demand. We found that structural changes are explained by the dependence of the national economy to world shocks, the IMF’s structural adjustment programme at the end of 1986.