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This study examines the compliance and disclosure levels of corporate governance practices of Malaysian firms under the MCCG 2012. Additionally, the study aims to deepen our understanding of the main drivers of corporate governance reporting in one of the fast developing countries in Asia. Data for 84 top companies listed with Bursa Malaysia are extracted from their 2013 annual reports. Sixty-four corporate governance disclosure items are utilised to develop a disclosure index which is taken as the dependent variable. The overall voluntary compliance and disclosure in Malaysia's top listed companies is good with an average of 77.1%, with minimum compliance level being 50% and maximum being 90%. Firm characteristics and corporate governance mechanisms are taken as the independent variables. Using OLS regression, the study finds that board size, institutional ownership, foreign ownership, profitability, and auditor size are the main determinants of corporate governance disclosure in Malaysia under MCCG 2012. The paper contributes to literature on disclosure and the reported findings are broadly consistent with the notion that good corporate governance generally leads to better corporate disclosure and transparency in developing capital markets.

This paper examines the relationship between earnings management (discretionary accruals), loan loss provision, risk and dividend per share. A balanced panel study of 10 banks over the period of 2000-2009 was used to observe the effect of loan loss provision (LLP), risks and dividend per share (DPS) as the potential cause that thrive earnings management. The model is tested using both panel random effects and feasible generalized least square. The results revealed that earnings management is significantly affected by the level of loan loss provisions, operational risks and systematic risks.

Stock market volatility is important in determining the cost of capital and to assess investment and leverage decisions since volatility is synonymous with risk. Risk-averse investors could be affected negatively due to substantial changes in volatility of the financial markets. We focus on the global crisis of 2007/2008 and its impact on the Malaysian financial market. We use GARCH models to model the volatility in order to determine the effect of the crisis on the KLCI. In order to be able to model the volatility, we first test the efficiency of the market using ARIMA models. We found that because of the financial crisis there was an increase in the impact of news about volatility from the previous periods but only a slight drop in the persistency of the conditional variance.

Many researchers claim that the stock markets are getting more and more integrated. In other words, it is believed that there are stronger financial market linkages or co-movements among the stock markets around the globe. We attempt to determine whether there are financial market linkages or co-movements. We have used three methods to examine the linkages or co-movements, namely, the correlation analysis, contegration analysis, and Granger-Causality test. The results for the correlation analysis suggest that financial market linkages are weak among the four countries undertaken in this study. Cointegration tests find that there is a long-run relationship as there is at most a single cointegrating vector. Finally, the Granger causality test finds that most of the stock markets are influencing other stock markets. Overall, the four stock markets do seem to have financial market linkages, or in other words, co-movement exists among these four stock markets.

This study measures the influence of six university qualities, namely academic quality, academic staff quality, management quality, industrial link quality and facilities’ quality on emotional attachment. A sample of 489 undergraduate students of a private higher acadecmic institution was collected. Using structural equation modeling, it is found that management quality, academic program quality, facilities quality and industrial link quality form significant relationship with emotional attachment. The results provide important findings to researchers for future research directions and management of higher education institutions (HEIs).