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This study aims to detect the impact of three personality traits on agents' sales performance. The moderating role of the unit manager's leadership style is highlighted too. MLQ-5X and Mini-IPIP questionnaires were distributed to 200 insurance sales agents in Lebanon. Using SEM, extraversion is found to be positively and significantly affecting sales performance whereas the neuroticism's impact is found to be negatively significant. Moreover, the transformational and the laissez-faire leadership styles are found to strengthen the positive relationship between extraversion and sales performance. Transactional leadership seemed to boost the negative relationship between neuroticism and sales performance. This study fills a gap in the literature and enriches it, specifically when it comes to the insurance industry in a Lebanese context.

Purpose The seepage of companies' capital accommodated by weak country-level institutions is inconducive to building sustainable businesses. Companies' performance on environmental, social and governance (ESG) issues is still a challenging question. This study aims to test the predictability of ESG on the performance of the health-care industry from a global perspective, while accounting for the country disclosure and director liability indices and performing robustness tests. Design/methodology/approach This study relies on panel data of 912 companies operating in 38 different countries for 2012–2020. This study controls for firm-level variables (leverage, size and loss), macroeconomic variables (COVID, gross domestic product and inflation) and institutional variables. Findings Findings indicate that countries with different levels of disclosure exhibit different patterns. Distinctly, the environmental pillar has a concave impact on return on assets, and the role of the disclosure index greatly manifests with the environmental pillar. Practical implications This study ponders the impact of country disclosure on sustainability practices from a global health-care perspective. Originality/value This paper is original, as it addresses the relationship between ESG performance and financial performance while accounting for the impact of institutional factors such as the business disclosure and director liability indices.

Purpose As reporting environmental, social and governance (ESG) information is not yet mandatory in all countries, it is intriguing to understand ESG’s underlying driving mechanisms. This study aims to investigate ESG determinants in the banking sector of the Middle East and North Africa countries. Design/methodology/approach The authors gather data for 38 listed banks for the period 2011–2019. The data used is threefold as follows: data related to ESG; firm-level; and country-level data. While ESG and firm’s level data are taken from Refinitiv, country-level data are extracted from the World Bank. Using panel regression, the authors test the effect of firm- and country-specific variables on the overall ESG score and its pillars. Findings Results indicate that banks’ ESG scores are negatively affected by performance and positively affected by size. The level of economic development exerts a negative impact on the environmental pillar while the social development exerts a positive impact on ESG and governance pillar. Corruption is the only country-level that gathers a homogenous effect on ESG scores. Finally, the three pillars follow heterogeneous patterns. Originality/value This study extends the scope of previous studies by introducing new country-level independent variables to contribute to the understanding of ESG antecedents.

Given the unsettled ESG-CFP (Environmental, Social, Governance-Corporate Financial Performance) relationship and the scarcity of research covering emerging markets firms and the impact of each of the ESG pillars on CFP while considering the industry sector categories, this paper is pioneer in investigating this relationship for 108 East Asian listed firms operating in the Industrials sector for the period extending from 2011 to 2017. The overall ESG scores together with their components are used to study their impact on CFP while considering accounting (Return on Assets (ROA) and Return on Equity (ROE)), and market measures (Stock Return (RET) and Price-to-Book ratio (PB)). We used panel corrected standard errors to address contemporaneous cross-correlations related to the panel cross-sections. Our findings showed that the ESG-CFP relationship depends on the ESG pillars, the type of CFP measures, and the industry nature. No relationship was detected between ESG and CFP when proxied by accounting measures while a concave relationship with Stock Return and a convex relationship with Price-to-Book ratio were revealed. When ESG pillars were considered separately, a convex relationship was obtained between Environmental and accounting performances and between Governance and Price-to-Book ratio while a concave relationship was depicted between Social and accounting performances. At the industry level, ESG negatively impacted the market performance in the Transportation industry compared to no impact in the Capital Goods industry. Consequently, ESG investment decisions in East Asian firms must be well calibrated and planned out to avoid undesired financial outcomes, while a shift in the mindset of managers toward a better ESG development is necessary to attain short-term gains and sustainable fiscal and social advantages.

This paper analyzes the volatility dynamics in the financial markets of the (three) most powerful countries from a military perspective, namely, the U.S., Russia, and China, during the period 2015&ndash, 2018 that corresponds to their intervention in the Syrian war. As far as we know, there is no literature studying this topic during such an important distress period, which has had very serious economic, social, and humanitarian consequences. The Generalized Autoregressive Conditional Heteroscedasticity (GARCH (1, 1)) model yielded the best volatility results for the in-sample period. The weighted historical simulation produced an accurate value at risk (VaR) for a period of one month at the three considered confidence levels. For the out-of-sample period, the Monte Carlo simulation method, based on student t-copula and peaks-over-threshold (POT) extreme value theory (EVT) under the Gaussian kernel and the generalized Pareto (GP) distribution, overstated the risk for the three countries. The comparison of the POT-EVT VaR of the three countries to a portfolio of stock indices pertaining to non-military countries, namely Finland, Sweden, and Ecuador, for the same out-of-sample period, revealed that the intervention in the Syrian war may be one of the pertinent reasons that significantly affected the volatility of the stock markets of the three most powerful military countries. This paper is of great interest for policy makers, central bank leaders, participants involved in these markets, and all practitioners given the economic and financial consequences derived from such dynamics.

This research aims at investigating the factors determining the dividend payout policy in the Lebanese banks listed on the Beirut Stock Exchange. This study considers the impact of seven variables, namely, profitability, liquidity, leverage, firm size, growth, firm risk and previous year’s dividend payout on the dividend payout ratios by using an unbalanced panel dataset of listed banks between the years of 2005 and 2011. Two models were tested using the OLS and the dynamic panel regressions. Empirical results show that the dividend payout policies are positively affected by the firm size, risk and previous year’s dividends, but are negatively affected by the opportunity growth and profitability. The results obtained might indicate that firms pay dividends with the intention of reducing the agency conflicts. Furthermore, managers take into consideration the stability of dividends while determining the dividend policy. Moreover, the results suggest that the Lebanese listed firms prefer to invest their earnings to grow rather than to pay more dividends.

Given the fact that the government debt is financed by commercial banks in Lebanon, there is a need to uncover and study the determinants of commercial bank deposits. This paper investigates empirically the main determinants of non-residents deposits in Lebanese commercial banks using monthly time series data covering January 2002 to January 2013 (131 observations). The necessary tests were performed so that the ordinary least square regression can be safely applied. The estimated model had non-resident deposits as the dependent variables, and the explanatory variables as internal factors, external variables, and bank specific variables. The dependent variable was measured in three ways: in the local currency, in foreign currency, and total non-resident deposits. The results show that non-residents’ deposits are shaped differently between domestic and foreign currency. For instance, bank assets, interest rates, and some adverse political situations affect non-resident deposits in all its measures. However, while total non-resident deposits and foreign non-residents deposits are roughly affected by the same factors, local resident deposits seem to be affected by other factors; this fact is attributed to the fact that local currency deposits account for a small percentage of total non-resident deposits. Based on the results, several policy implications were drawn that aim at increasing non-resident deposits. First, the stability of macroeconomic system should be maintained. Second, the government should maintain healthy rate differentials to support the deposit growth. Lastly, Lebanese banks should search for internalization to diversify their losses.