This paper is the first research attempt that investigates the impact of a large number of corporate governance mechanisms on the performance of Greek banks, employing widely accepted in the literature of corporate governance econometric models. Results indicate that system GMM models are more suitable methodological tools than pooled OLS and fixed effects models to address well-known econometric problems, such as endogeneity, simultaneity and unobserved heterogeneity of individual banks. The findings, as derived from the application of GMM models, imply that increasing the board size and the number of independent directors can both have positive impact on the performance of Greek banks, but only up to a certain point. Thus, bank efficiency will increase as board size and the proportion of independent directors grow up to a point where these relationships hit a maximum from which bank performance decreases. Our multi-model estimations failed to trace any significant contribution of the number of female and foreign directors on the performance of Greek banks. Finally, the dual appointment of a CEO as Chairman appears to affect negatively two out of four proxies of bank performance. Overall, the results provide support for the positive impact of corporate governance mechanisms on the performance of Greek banks. The significance of these findings increases, considering that the period under study (2008)(2009)(2010)(2011)(2012)(2013)(2014) is marked by high market volatility and uncertainty due to the well-known debt crisis that plagues Greece since the beginning of 2008.

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This study utilizes quantile regressions to investigate the effect of the determinants of share repurchases on firms at different points of the share repurchases distribution.  Empirical results from a large panel of  NYSE repurchasing firms, document an asymmetric effect of several determinants on share repurchases in terms of size, significance and direction. Excess capital, stock options and growth opportunities are significant throughout the distribution and their impact increases at successive quantiles while ownership concentration and leverage exhibit sign reversals between lower and upper quantiles. These differing effects are attributed to highly heterogeneous firm characteristics across quantiles.

It is supported by academics and scholars that defense expenditure can significantly affect a country's economic growth and in some cases it influences external debt having implications in various macroeconomic indicators. However, relevant empirical studies have produced contradictory evidence while the literature in this field remains relatively poor. In this spirit, this survey investigates the causal links between military expenditure and external debt for four emerging Northern Africa countries (i.e. Egypt, Tunisia, Algeria and Morocco) during the period 1988-2009. Empirical findings on the long-term relationship between the tested variables are based on cointegration test. The Granger Causality test results using Vector Auto Regression (VAR) estimates and the Error Correction Model imply that there is no dynamic causal link between military expenditure and external debt for Tunisia, Algeria and Morocco. On the other hand regarding Egypt, results imply that a strong unidirectional causality exists running from defense expenditure to external debt. Collectively, empirical calculations show that military burden do not have any significant impact on most Northern Africa countries. The only exception is the case of Egypt; empirical results show that military expenditure robustly affect the country's external debt. These are the only findings provided from this study that validate the hypothesis that military burden may be important in determining the evolution of debt in developing countries.