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The paper examines the benefits of financial accounting comparability for an emerging market. We document the benefits in the form of foreign equity investments. Our empirical results find that foreign investors prefer to invest in firms showing more accounting comparability. Our results also reveal that the benefits of accounting comparability are more prominent when firms have less visibility, operate in a less competitive industry, and have stock prices that reflect a lower level of firm-specific information. We further find that the effect of accounting comparability is lower for domestic mutual fund ownership. Overall, our study suggests that accounting comparability can complement a poor information environment concerning emerging market firms.

This paper studies the impact of the nonfinancial disclosure on firm value for a large sample of Indian firms, arguably emerging market with poor investor protections and legal enforcement. We proxy the nonfinancial disclosure by the Bloomberg score on the extent of a firm's Environmental, Social, and Governance disclosures, and find positive valuation effects associated with the nonfinancial disclosure. We find the nonfinancial disclosure is more valuable to standalone firms compared to business group firms. This paper shows that the positive valuation effects associated with the nonfinancial disclosure are attributable to lower cost of funds and higher operating cash flows.

We examined the dependence structure of stocks, gold and crude oil with financial stress using the nonparametric causality-in-quantile technique for the period from December 1993 to March 2017. The study finds the evidence of bilateral causality in mean and variance for gold and crude oil with respect to financial stress, and stocks to be influential to financial stress both in mean and variance.

This paper introduces a new dimension to the relationship between Economic Policy Uncertainty (EPU) and Stock Prices (SP) by extending the contributions of Ko and Lee (2015) by using multiple and partial wavelet coherence techniques. The vulnerability of SP due to combined and isolated impact of international (US EPU) and Domestic Policy Uncertainty (DEPU) is investigated. The main findings are; (a) the combined effect of DEPU and US EPU is more significant for developed market’s SP, (b) the emerging market’s SP are more sensitive to DEPU and (c) Amongst developed markets, Japan and European countries are more sensitive to US EPU than DEPU.

This study examines the dynamic relationship between precious metals and stock markets of major developed (G7) and emerging (BRICS) nations. We use a hybrid wavelet-based Dynamic Conditional Correlation (DCC) approach, which allows us to investigate the dynamic relationship between precious metals and stock markets in time and frequency domain. Our results suggest that DCC between the return series of precious metals and stock market varies with timescales in terms of dynamicity, persistence and strength of relationship. G7 and BRICS nations exhibit different dynamicity with precious metals over the study period (2000 to 2017). The dynamics between precious metals and G7 stock markets show similar patterns, which depicts a clustering behaviour, however, same is not true for BRICS nations. In contrast to existing literature, this study found that silver offers better hedging capability than other precious metals for both short and long-run. To construct a two-asset optimal portfolio of precious metal and stock index, palladium emerges as the most favourable option for both short and long-run.

We investigate the effect of Environmental, Social, Governance (ESG)-related disclosure on foreign investments for Indian firms where financial reporting does not provide adequate and reliable information. We show a preference of foreign investors for firms disclosing ESG-related information. Our results suggest that ESG-related disclosure is particularly useful for firms facing information problems. Finally, we report that the effect of ESG-related disclosure is lesser on domestic investors.