This study attempts to explore the effect of corporate governance parameters like board size and independent directors along with firm-specific characteristics such as age, size and profitability on the environmental performance disclosure of 38 National Stock Exchange (NSE) listed Indian non-financial companies for the period of 2013–2017. This study uses panel data analysis and finally documents a positive impact of board size and age of firm on the environmental performance disclosures of Indian companies. The study also finds a significant and negative effect of board independence on the environmental performance disclosure of such companies. The study based on its findings questions the role of independent directors as an internal regulatory body and suggests external regulatory specifications for better environmental performance and its disclosure to the public.

The study attempts to provide some fresh evidences, on the way in which ownership concentration by promoters influences firm value by re-examining two popularly known hypotheses, namely, monitoring and expropriation attached with the concept of ownership concentration. It uses a set of strongly balanced panel data consisting 91 manufacturing firms listed on Bombay Stock Exchange of India from 2009 to 2016 and employs fixed effect regression model under panel data analysis. The study documents a positive effect of concentrated promoters’ ownership on the value of Indian manufacturing firms and endorses the monitoring role played by large owners. It also accepts the possibility of co-existence of both monitoring and expropriation effects, with the former having a dominating influence, as the overall impact of large promoters is a trade-off between the benefits of active monitoring and cost of expropriation. The study is expected to have important implications in strategy making in the domain of corporate finance and governance and to act as a piece of reliable empirical evidence for the academicians and business analysts of this domain.

This empirical investigation attempts to enquire into the relationship among debt financing, agency cost and performance of Indian manufacturing firms. The study tries to document the impact of debt financing on firm performance in two different phases of panel data estimations. In the first phase, the study enquires the effect of debt on firms’ profitability measured by ‘return on equity’. The second phase tries to empirically explain the reason behind such impact by introducing agency cost. Considering the manufacturing firms traded in the BSE 200 Index from 2009–2016, the study documents a significant and negative effect of debt on firm performance. The magnitude of debt is also found to be positively affecting the agency cost measured by ‘general and administrative expenses’. So the negative effect of debt on firm performance is reinforced and justified as debt is also found to elevate the agency costs for the firms.

This study attempts to contribute towards the prevalent understanding and the extant literatures on the effect of changes in money supply as an important monetary policy shock on the stock prices of India by using a time-varying parameter models with vector autoregressive specification during the period 1996 to 2016. The result of Johansen’s cointegration test suggests a significantly positive long-run co-movement between the growth of money supply and stock prices in India but the result of vector error correction model (VECM) does not exhibit any significant relationship in short run. Further, the error correction term of the VECM reveals a long-run unidirectional causality from money supply to stock prices. However, the Granger causality test confirms that the growth rate of money supply does not cause the stock market movement in India in short run. Finally, the variance decomposition analysis reveals that both the Indian stock markets are strongly exogenous in the sense that shocks to money supply explain only a small portion of the forecast variance error of the market indices. Again, the impulse response function analysis indicates that a positive shock in money supply has a small but persistently positive effect on stock prices in India.

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