Dr. Ahmed Imran Hunjra

• Post-Doc (Finance), PhD (Finance), MS (Finance), MBA (Finance), MSc. (Economics), BSc. (Mathematics)
• Associate Professor at IPAG Business School

Purpose This study aims to investigate the impact of corporate social responsibility (CSR) on financial reporting quality (FRQ). In addition, the role of board gender diversity (BGD) in the CSR–FRQ relationship is investigated. Design/methodology/approach The study’s sample includes 135 nonfinancial Pakistan Stock Exchange-listed companies from 20...

Effective corporate governance and high audit quality foster transparency, accountability, and disclosure and ensure the management of cash holdings efficiently. This research investigates the impact of corporate governance and audit quality on cash holdings using a sample from 461 non-financial South Asian firms covering 2010-2023. The empirical r...

In this study, we test the influence of financial flexibility [FF] on corporate risk-taking [RT], a crucial aspect of firm strategy and performance. In the volatile financial landscape of emerging markets like China, understanding how FF affects risk behavior is essential. Using data from 3,571 Chinese listed firms spanning 2014 to 2023, we address...

Purpose In the context of macroeconomic fluctuations and uncertainty in policy changes, it is essential to understand how companies adapt their environmental strategies and marketing tactics to ensure survival and growth. This study, therefore, examines the impact of perceived economic policy uncertainty on corporate greenwashing. Design/methodolo...

This study investigates the impact of economic uncertainty on information asymmetry and ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance) controversies within companies, while exploring the moderating role of digital integration. By analyzing a panel of 1303 companies across 20 European countries from 2016 to 2023, and employing the two‐stage generalized...

Finance is undergoing a profound transformation. Digital technologies are reshaping payments, lending, insurance, and wealth management. Big data technology is now an integral part of the financial services industry and will continue to drive future innovation. Digital finance has fundamentally changed how we live and do business, and it has been a...

This paper investigates the relationship between CEO characteristics and the speed of adjustment (SOA) of capital structure for listed firms in Vietnam over the period 2000-2019. Our findings demonstrate that CEO gender, age, and education increase the SOA, but CEO tenure decreases the SOA. As state ownership and firm size are closely associated wi...

This book covers green finance with a focus on the environmental, social, and governance (ESG) consequences of green financing and its role in attaining sustainable development and a carbon-neutral economy. It provides research-based practical solutions for sustainable development, as well as insights from green finance, presenting a framework for...

This study investigates the impact of renewable and non-renewable energy consumption, governance quality, and economic growth on environmental sustainability across frontier, emerging, and developed economies from 2001 to 2021. The Environmental Performance Index (EPI) and Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are environmental sustainability measur...

This title in the Building the Future of Tourism series offers a comprehensive overview of the significant challenges faced by the tourism industry in the area of sustainable development. Leading specialists from a range of fields cover a wide spectrum of topics under the main themes of The Economics of Tourism Supply; Tourism Economics at the Nati...

Environmental pollution has become highly important for countries and societies because climate change and global warming are stimulated by increasing carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions. Hence, all related parties have been searching for solutions. Considering the high role of energy use in causing CO2 emissions, energy-related research and development...

We explore the non-linear relationship between financial flexibility and enterprise risk-taking, investigating the non-linear nature of this association across distinct periods: pre-pandemic, post-pandemic, and the overall sample period. We analyze a sample of 2503 Chinese listed firms, segmented into different time phase. Our design allows for an...

Natural capital is a central consideration for developing informed policies for economic growth and sustainable development; however, the proportion of human capital, natural capital, and produced capital in inclusive wealth has been rapidly evolving. These forms of capital may have varying impact on sustainable development compared with aggregate...

Ethical finance involves financial practices that consider environmental, social, and governance (ESG) factors affecting a borrower and/or its assets. This approach extends beyond traditional financial metrics, aiming to align investments and lending with principles promoting sustainability, social responsibility, and effective governance. While pr...

This chapter describes the role of financing in achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The achievement of SDGs is an ongoing concern for the Millennium Development Goals, although the financial structure and sustainable investment projects are closely aligned with the SDGs. Our research provides useful insights into the fact that the d...

The COVID-19 pandemic has posed considerable difficulties for the shift to clean energy sources. COVID-19’s potential impact on the global energy transition has received scant scholarly attention so far. This research aims to explore the impact of renewable energy consumption and renewable power generation on sustainable economic development in dev...

This paper examines the behavior of currencies' intraday exchange rates with mainly focuses on predicting these behaviors through deep learning models. The time series data are used in this study and comprise intraday exchange rate data for seven volatile currencies, recorded at two different frequency intervals: 1 h and 30 min. The data cover the...

This study examines the relationship between corporate environmental performance (ENP) and financial performance, focusing on US firms from 2001 to 2021. Environmental sustainability has become a pivotal issue facing businesses. However, empirical findings on the ENP–financial performance linkage remain mixed. The sample comprises 2,711 US firms an...

This study investigates the impact of the Russo–Ukrainian war-induced uncertainty on multidimensional connectedness measures across global stock and commodity markets using various time-, frequency-, and quantile-based approaches. The results show that the conflict has significantly increased the connectedness among the volatilities of global finan...

In the current era, the development paradigm has shifted from simple economic development to sustainable development. Sustainable development has clear objectives to avoid natural resource exploitation due to increasing economic and environmental threats, such as economic unsustainability, pollution, and natural disasters. To achieve the objective...

This study analyses the cost of financial distress of non-financial firms listed on the Pakistan stock exchange. Furthermore, it considers the moderating role of concentrated ownership in the relationship between debt and expected financial distress costs. We used the panel data of 214 firms from 2010 to 2018 to analyse the results. We apply fixed...

This article explores the impact of fuel price movements on the stock market return of 2020 during the COVID-19 disruptions. In doing so, a monthly data of seven selected stock market indices representing developed and emerging economies globally was used for analysis. The study used a time-varying parameter VAR model to examine a time-varying caus...

Purpose Internationalization and financial deregulation have caused market participants and policymakers to consider the significance of financial connectedness and the spillover effects of shocks. In this context, this research is a pioneering effort to investigate the direction and magnitude of return volatility spillovers between Pakistan’s fina...

The present paper analyses the impact of institutional quality on sustainable development in 65 developing economies belonging to various regions over the period 1984 to 2019. As sustainable development indicators, it considers adjusted net savings for economic sustainability, and CO2 emissions and forest area preservation as environmental sustaina...

This chapter identifies the role of macroeconomic and financial policies in climate change mitigation in developing economies. The developing economies are continuously facing macroeconomic and financial stabilization policy issues, while the financial structure and new green investment projects are in close alignment with climate change mitigation...

Information and communication technologies (ICTs) play a vital role in innovation. ICTs facilitate innovation and boost the potential to generate innovative goods in developing countries. This article examined the heterogeneous impact of institutional quality and ICTs on environmental convergence (i.e., per capita $\mathrm{C}{\mathrm{O}}_2\ $ emi...

The paper uses a Spatial-Temporal decomposition approach to production to examine the relative environmental performances of eight geographic regions of China for the period 2006–2014. The study results show that the effects of the economic and energy usage efficiency are high, and their values indicate above-average performance. In terms of the ef...

The emergence of financial technology in several business areas has spurred the need to analyze its impact and implementation in the Islamic banking industry. This study is one of the unique studies to investigate the application of Fintech innovations in the Islamic banks of Pakistan. The study employed content analysis on the annual reports of Pa...

We investigate the role of financial policy uncertainty in climate change risk. We use the financial policies uncertainty index to estimate its composite effectiveness on climate change. We test the financial development role from two perspectives covering the credit channel and market liquidation facilities for climate change. We also test the rol...

Assessing the financial stability of the banking industry, particularly in credit risk management, has become extremely crucial in times of uncertainty. Given that, this paper aims to investigate the determinants of the interconnectedness of sectoral credit risk default for developing countries. To that purpose, we employ a dynamic credit risk mode...

Understanding sectoral dynamic dependence across equity indexes is crucial for investment decisions and designing economic policy. This study examines the sectoral dependence among 82 Pakistani companies using a vine copula approach and daily data from July 1, 2014, to December 17, 2019. Vine copulas represent a flexible dependence approach capable...

We examine the impact of political risk, macroeconomic policy uncertainty, and social risk on sustainable development for a panel covering 47 developing economies from 1991 to 2020. We present an augmented green Solow growth model linking policy risk and uncertainty to sustainable development through their interaction with pollution abatement activ...

Business decisions influence the level of idiosyncratic risk. Several factors that contribute to idiosyncratic risk must be explored. Therefore, we examine the impact of innovation and institutional ownership on idiosyncratic risk for NYSE- and NASDAQ-listed firms. The sample contains 30,888 firm-year observations based on annual data from 2003 to...

This study proposes a framework for fraud detection in the auto insurance industry by using predictive models. The feature selection is performed utilizing a publicly available car insurance dataset and uncovers the most influential feature through Boruta algorithm. Three predictive models (logistic regression, support vector machine, and naïve Bay...

We use the bibliometric and content analysis of 174 documents retrieved from the Scopus database to present the publication trends in Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs) since 2018 and highlight the top publishing source with the most contributing authors in their affiliated countries. While showing influential studies, important themes covered...

An institutional structure may affect traditional drivers of development, such as foreign direct investment and economic growth, and emerging economies’ ability to achieve sustainable development. This study expands on this literature by assessing the role of market-supporting institutions in achieving sustainable development goals in 42 developing...

The last few years have witnessed an explosion of research on Sustainable development. Most of this research is concentrated on the developed countries related to the issues not compatible with developing countries. This paper fills the gap and reviews the literature related to developing and emerging economies and their environmental and social co...

Purpose This study examines the influence of access to finance and social capital on the improvement of the corporate performance of non-listed firms of Southeast Asian countries. Furthermore, this paper also explores the mediating role of firms' access to finance between the association of social capital and the improvement of corporate performanc...

This study investigates calendar anomalies in eight Islamic frontier markets. Our sample consists of the daily closing prices of their stock indices for the period of January 2006 to September 2019. The data are categorized with respect to day-of-the-week and month-of-the-year according to both the Gregorian and Islamic calendars. We control for ti...

The rapid growth of Islamic banking around the globe has led to questions about the role it plays in the economy. In this paper, we examine whether Islamic banking acts as a substitute or complement to conventional banking in promoting macroeconomic efficiency in countries with a dual-banking system. Using a one-stage Stochastic Frontier (SF) appro...

This paper investigates the impact of financial development on sustainable economic development (SED) in low-middle-income countries. It adopts an unbalanced panel data approach on 50 low-and middle-income countries over the period of 1991–2020. We apply Fixed effects (FE), the feasible generalized least squares (FGLS) and bootstrap panel quantile...

Purpose Earnings management (EM) plays a vital role in risk management. This paper aims to investigate the impact of real earning management (REM) on credit risk. Design/methodology/approach This paper measures the credit risk by the expected default frequency of Kealhofer, McQuown and Vasicek model. This paper uses data from 2011 to 2020 of Pakis...

Purpose Ownership structure deals with internal corporate governance mechanism, which plays important role in minimizing conflict of interests between shareholders and management Ownership structure is an important mechanism that influences the value of firm, financing and dividend decisions. This paper aims to examine the impact of the ownership s...

Corporate governance plays a significant role in the value of shareholders and share prices, hence stock market liquidity is affected. Previous research has mainly focused on the issue in developed markets, whereas in developing countries there is a need to analyze the influence of corporate governance on stock market liquidity. Therefore, the pres...

Efficient environmental resource management is a serious concern for sustainable development in developing countries. This study determines the impact of institutional quality on sustainable development, based on total factor productivity improvements through the environmental regulatory process by way of abatement policies using an augmented endog...

The COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in substantial constraints for small and medium enterprises (SMEs) worldwide. The techniques in which SMEs handle recent crises and the degree to which environmental performance is advantageous when the marketplace experiences an adverse shock is fairly untouched in the literature. To assess this probability, we e...

The discussion in this chapter rekindles the century-old debate on the association between Financial Development (FD) and Economic Growth (EG). This chapter draws from extant literature to discuss the nexus between FD and EG and provides insights on underlying theories, empirical evidence, methodologies adopted in prior studies that investigate and...

Purpose We examine the impact of asymmetric information on firm’s financing decision, the feedback effect of changes in capital structure on the level of asymmetric information, and the speed of adjustments in capital structure on its target leverage. Design/methodology/approach We extract the data on 280 non-financial firms listed in the Pakistan...

p>We investigate the evidence of three risk-adjusted calendar anomalies in eight frontier markets. Our sample consists of the daily closing prices of their stock indices for the period of January 2006 to September 2019. We categorize the data with respect to day-of-the-week, Lunar calendar and Islamic calendar. Using Morgan Stanley Capital Interna...

Using gender as a theoretical framework, we analyse the dynamics of debt and equity financing during the COVID-19 pandemic for a cross-country sample of 8,921 private firms. We provide evidence of a slight gender bias in debt financing, with creditors favouring female entrepreneurs when dealing with cash flow problems during the COVID-19 pandemic....

The Covid-19 pandemic continues to disturb the global economy and capital markets. Governments across the globe relentlessly enact health policy measures to contain coronavirus and undertake economic relief programs to reduce the impacts on their economies. This paper examines the effects of Covid-19 government health measures on the volatility of...

We investigate the impact of asymmetric information on the investment decision of firms and analyze the effect of asymmetric information on the over-investment and under-investment of firms. Further, we examine the effect of leverage on the investment behavior of firms and check this association in the presence of asymmetric information. We extract...

Purpose Economic risk plays a vital role in firm's cash holdings. We aim to determine the impact of economic risk on the firm's cash holdings. Design/methodology/approach The data is collected from the DataStream from 2002 to 2018, which covers 552 listed firms in the manufacturing sector of Pakistan, Sri Lanka, India and Bangladesh. We apply a tw...

We analyze the impact of corporate political connections on the cost of equity of non-financial firms listed at the Pakistan Stock Exchange. We extract data from the DataStream and Election Commission of Pakistan for the years 2001 to 2018. The Generalized Method of Moments is used for data analysis. This research finds that firms use political con...

Banks not only rely on the traditional way of generating income, they also opt for non-interest income (NII) to survive in a competitive environment. Banks in South Asia are diversifying their income from interest to non-interest sources in order to reduce risk and generate high returns. This study examines the impact of non-interest income (NII) a...

We aim to construct portfolios by employing different risk models and compare their performance in order to understand their appropriateness for effective portfolio management for investors. Mean variance (MV), semi variance (SV), mean absolute deviation (MaD) and conditional value at risk (CVaR) are considered as risk measures. The price data were...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to investigate the impact of diversification, corporate governance and capital regulations on bank risk-taking in Asian emerging economies. Design/methodology/approach The authors applied the generalized method of moments to analyze a sample of 116 listed banks of ten Asian emerging economies for the years 2010...

Financial inclusion (FI) provides significant possibilities for poverty alleviation. Information communication technology (ICT) is an essential component of any FI strategy aiming to enable access to a wide range of financial products and services. This study explores entrepreneurs’ assessments of the role of ICT for their FI and its effect in Afri...

Investment is the commitment of funds to one or more assets in order to gain future benefits. Many people in Pakistan join workforce, therefore, there is a potential for salaried employees for investment in different options. Unluckily, this phenomenon is less investigated in Pakistani context. The objective of this study is to investigate the impa...

There are many factors, which play a vital role in the financing decisions of firms, and one of the important factors is corporate political strategies. This study examines the impact of corporate political strategies on the cost of debt of non-financial firms listed in the Pakistan Stock Exchange (PSX). Corporate political strategies are measured...