Accounting Information Quality and Investment Decisions

Accounting information quality has been said to play an important role in reducing information asymmetry. Thus, firms with high accounting information quality may enhance more investors’ decisions. This paper aims to empirically examine the association between accounting information quality and investment decisions among firms in Tunisia. The sample of this study consists of 50 firms listed on the Tunis Stock Exchange covering 2012 to 2016. The findings imply that accounting information quality is significantly negatively related to investment inefficiency. The inclusion of control variables and the use of alternative models to measure accounting information quality provide consistent findings. This paper has several important contributions. First, this paper provides new empirical evidence in an emerging market. Although emerging markets make up the vast majority of economic activity around the world, they have received limited attention in academic research. Second, this paper can also help researchers to better understand and realize the governance role of accounting information, and push them to investigate the other role of accounting information deeply and broadly.

Financial Literacy as a Tool for Stimulating the Investment Behaviour of Rural Women: An Empirical Assessment

Clapping with two hands create the sounds. Similarly, investment and saving behaviour are considered as the most vital elements for economic growth of an individual. This paper is to evaluate the influence of financial awareness on saving and investment behaviour of rural females in India. Investment pattern serves as a link between savings and wants of the common people. Economic growth of any nation can be critically measured through capital accumulation and investment trends in financial markets. In the present study, the investment behaviour on effect of financial awareness of 335 rural women in Jalandhar district has been evaluated. The relationship of financial literacy and saving & investment behaviour is also evaluated in the context of five basic domains of financial behaviour, such as demographic variables, financial control, financial planning, financial product selection and financial literacy. Results of the study revealed that rural women are conscious about the availability of various investment avenues in the market, but their investment pattern is still followed by some factors like familiarity, safety and assured returns, etc. This study suggests policymakers to focus on financial awareness rather to focus only on financial literacy.

The Trouble with Minding Markets: Emotional Finance in Context

The term ‘Emotional Finance’ normally denotes a methodological approach advocated by Richard Taffler and David Tuckett, which they intended as a challenge both to Behavioral Finance and to mainstream finance and economics. In the wake of the Great Financial Crisis, Emotional Finance received a warm reception from regulators, the financial press, and the CFA Institute. Nearly a decade on, their ideas have largely failed to achieve traction in the academic literature, and continue to struggle to find empirical validation. Their approach is essentially an application of Kleinian psychoanalysis to financial markets, albeit without the terminological rigor that psychoanalytic practitioners might expect. Because their approach is inherently interdisciplinary, it has rarely been subject to scrutiny, as few psychoanalytic commentators feel qualified to comment on financial markets, and fewer finance academics feel comfortable commenting on the psychoanalytic theory. This chapter characterizes the main theoretical claims of Emotional Finance, and subjects each of them to scrutiny, finding them largely untenable. Although financial bubbles are commonplace and emotional responses to markets unremarkable, the subsidiary arguments advanced by advocates of Emotional Finance to support their primary claims are found wanting. The interpretative strategy of Emotional Finance is fundamentally flawed. Although it is fruitful to analyze the role of emotions in financial markets, more precise, rigorous and realistic approaches to these problems are needed.

Estimating Short-Term Returns with Volatilities for High Frequency Stock Trades in Emerging Economies Using Gaussian Processes (GPs)

Fundamental theorem behind financial markets is that stock prices are intrinsically complex and stochastic in nature. One of the complexities is the volatilities associated with stock prices. Price volatility is often detrimental to the return economics and thus investors should factor it in when making investment decisions, choices, and temporal or permanent moves. It is therefore crucial to make necessary and regular stock price volatility forecasts for the safety and economics of investors’ returns. These forecasts should be accurate and not misleading. Different traditional models and methods such as ARCH, GARCH have been intuitively implemented to make such forecasts, however they fail to effectively capture the short-term volatility forecasts. In this paper we investigate and implement a combination of numeric and probabilistic models towards short-term volatility and return forecasting for high frequency trades. The essence is that: one-day-ahead volatility forecasts were made with Gaussian Processes (GPs) applied to the outputs of a numerical market prediction (NMP) model. Firstly, the stock price data from NMP was corrected by a GP. Since it not easy to set price limits in a market due to its free nature, and randomness of the prices, a censored GP was used to model the relationship between the corrected stock prices and returns. To validate the proposed approach, forecasting errors were evaluated using the implied and estimated data.

Tunisian Fintech: An Ecosystem under Construction - Can COVID 19 be the Fuel to Ignite the Construction of Tunisian Fintech?

Fintech leads the most powerful technology and finance in the industry. Appearing recently in the newspapers, this term describes the disruptive challenge in the financial sectors. Fintech has primarily emerged in the world, and then Europe followed the lead before it starts in Tunisia. Although Fintech attracts the customers through the innovation and the technology, it worries users because of the absence of the intermediaries. Fintechs create metamorphosis in the financial field of digital disruption and really shake up the reserved world of banking services, savings, means of payment, and financing. The main idea of this chapter is to describe the Fintech ecosystem in Tunisia. It is about situating the concepts around Fintech by studying the reasons for its emergence and its business segments. Then, the analysis provides the elements of the Tunisian ecosystem of Fintech, the issues, and the challenges. This chapter aims to capture the essence of this phenomenon by discussing the challenges for both Fintech startups and traditional financial.