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The present study examines the impact of board diversity on financial reporting quality with special consideration of the extent to which family and royal directors influence financial reporting quality (FRQ). The study utilises a sample of 181 listed GCC firms over the period from 2010 to 2016. Board personal attributes, including board expertise, age, gender, and nationality are investigated along with some other board issues such as; board size, meetings, and independence. Panel data analysis with fixed and random effect models are conducted to estimate the results. The results reveal that companies with large board size and greater age have less FRQ. Further, the results report that institutional founders, higher board independence, and expertise associate with greater levels of FRQ. The results also find that board meetings and family founders negatively influence FRQ. However, female directors, foreign directors, and royal board members setting in the board did not contribute to the levels of FRQ in the sampled companies. Finally, the results indicate that companies with a CEO royal member have higher levels of FRQ however, companies with chair board royals have less levels of FRQ. This research has valuable implications for investors, board of directors, analysts, academicians, and policymakers.

With the worldwide dispersion of COVID-19, banking sector, among others, needs to adapt to unexpected challenges. For this purpose, this study examines the impact of sustainable banking regulations on bank-specific characteristics pre and during COVID19 period in Pakistan for the period spanning from 2006 to 2020. Moreover, financial stability is employed to test its moderating role on sustainable banking regulations. The dynamic estimator, named the system-Generalized Method of Moments, is used to analyze the endogenous nature of the data. Findings suggest that capital adequacy ratio, deposit ratio, and loan ratio are positive whereas leverage ratios are negatively related to profitability and market return. Overall, findings reveal that sustainable banking regulations influenced the bank-specific characteristics substantially. Importantly, the year-wise averages of variables reveal that Pakistani banks have made significant improvements in profitability, market return, capital adequacy, and deposit ratio pre and during pandemic era. Additionally, the financial stability significantly moderates the relationship highlighting lower default risk and the effectiveness of sustainable banking operations. Practically, despite global lockdowns, economic and trade restrictions during COVID-19, State Bank of Pakistan, sustained health of banking sector through its well-regulated monitoring mechanism.

Corporate financial responsibility is the sole driving force of business in the business sector, as the primary goals of a firm are to maximize profit and grow shareholder value. However, in the previous decade, larger corporate obligations have been recognized, including environmental, local community, working conditions, and ethical standards. With the rise of "sustainability" reasons, unprecedented climate change is being measured into corporate strategy in the direction of sustainable thinking. The triple bottom line (TBL) is a sustainability assessment that combines environmental and social factors in addition to profitability and the rate of return on investment. The purpose of this research is to look into the interrelationships between the three dimensions of sustainable performance measurement (SPM) in Malaysian manufacturing companies. A questionnaire is issued to 600 manufacturing companies in the Federation of Malaysian Manufacturers (FMM) as part of a quantitative data collection approach. All the proposed hypotheses are supported, thus showing the interrelationship between three dimensions of SPM existed. Consequently, Malaysian companies are lagging behind in terms of SPM’s adoption compared to developed countries. Because of that, more government efforts to facilitate the adoption of SPM practice among companies are needed. The sole focus on the manufacturing industry, accuracy of data collection and time constraint are the limitations of this study. Therefore, it is suggested that further research should explore more the interrelationship between the three dimensions of SPM.

The rapid developments in the United Arab Emirates along with the repeated seismic activity confirm the significance of planning for the possible damage that may hit earthquake-prone areas in order to mitigate earthquake losses. The contemporary buildings are the most important when estimating the potential losses from earthquakes since they represent concentrated economic and human assets. This study aims at developing vulnerability functions for a wide range of modern building inventory in a highly-populated and earthquake-prone area in the UAE. Ten reference buildings with varying heights from 2 to 100 stories and three different lateral force resisting systems are selected to represent the study area. The reference buildings are completely designed and detailed as per the design provisions and construction practice utilized in the UAE. Detailed fiber-based numerical models are developed for the reference structures and forty natural earthquake records are selected to account for the uncertainty in seismic demands. Over 5,000 inelastic analyses are performed to derive three-dimensional vulnerability functions for the investigated structural systems. It is concluded that, unlike the satisfactory performance of the shear wall and tube in tube structural systems, the flat slabcolumns system is vulnerable to the severe distant earthquakes. It is suggested to decrease the overstrength factor and increase the deflection amplification factor by 10% for the low-rise flat slab-columns system. For the shear wall and tube in tube systems, the force reduction factors can be increased by at least 10%, with a possibility of further increase after a thorough assessment of the proposed reduction in seismic loads. It is also proposed to adopt an effective stiffness of 0.5EI, 0.8EI and 1.0EI for the vertical elements of the flat slab-columns, shear wall and tube in tube vii structural systems, respectively, to arrive at an accurate estimate of the inelastic periods of vibration

Network with many types of traffic such as video conferencing, audio and data transfer requires a specific Quality of Services (QoS)to maintain their performance. It is crucial for the switch designer to guarantee QoS for all applications. In this paper,a new way of handling multi -class traffic has been presented. The analysis is done on 16x16 switch with two priority traffic classes and dual threshold setting.Dual threshold setting is implemented on the 16x16 switch to ensure a better control on the priority setting for both classes.In the reality, switch application operates under non-uniform traffic condition.Thus,the analysis in this paper is done under two different kind of non-uniform traffic patterns which are known as the hot-spot pattern and Community-of-Interest (COI) pattern. The roposed method is simulated to show that the delay performance of the non-uniform traffic patterns for the proposed switch architecture has been improved.

Shared buffer is commonly used to utilize the buffer in the switch. In order to minimize the cell lost of high class traffic in multi-class switch, the threshold is set to drop the low class cells in the shared buffer. This will give more space to accommodate the high class traffic cells. In this paper, we analyse the performance of shared buffer with different threshold settings. The multi-class shared buffer architecture is developed for 16x16 ports switch, which is targeted for Xilinx FPGA implementation. The performance of the multi-class shared buffer switch is analysed in term of the achievable throughput as well as the drop probability. Based on the simulation with different threshold settings, it is observed that the optimum selection of cell drop threshold depends on the size of the shared buffer that triggers the RAM threshold.

High packet network have become an essential in modern multimedia communication. Shared buffer is commonly used to utilize the buffer in the switch. In this paper, we analyse the performance of shared buffer with different memory sizes. The architecture of the multi-class shared buffer is developed for 16×16 ports switch that is targeted in Xilinx FPGA. The performance of the multi-class shared buffer switch is analysed in term of throughput and mean delay. Based on the simulation with different memory sizes, it is observed that the optimum selection of memory size under uniform traffic depends on the maximum traffic load of the switch.