The purpose of this study is to figure out the role of corporate governance in competitive industries and its impact along with product market competition on firm’s value. The sample of this study is obtained from the PSX-100 index, containing fifty-two non-financial firms from 2009 to 2018. This study documents the complementary association between competition in the product market and governance mechanisms. It concludes that good governance in Pakistani firms improves the value of the firm only in highly competitive industries, largely through mitigating the agency problem of empire-building. These findings are robust by employing alternate measures of sample division, firm governance structure, regression specifications, and ownership structure. Policymakers are required to focus governance policies mainly on the firms in highly competitive industries to get maximum progress. Moreover, they also need to improve anti-trust laws to increase the level of competition in all industries in the context of Pakistan.

This study aims to investigate the moderating influence of accounting standards on the relationship between corporate governance and accounting conservatism in the financial statements of firms in the Islamic Republic of Pakistan. A sample of the seventy most active nonfinancial firms for the period 2009-2021 is used for hypothesis testing. The corporate governance mechanisms used in this study cover ownership structure, and board characteristics. Data of relevant variables have been obtained from the open door for all, PSX, and sites of SBP. Panel data methodology has been employed to ensure the influence of corporate governance on conservatism in presence of accounting standards used as a moderator. The findings of the first model (direct effect) in this study indicate that managerial ownership, Institutional ownership, board attendance, board independence, and board diversity have a significant positive association whereas, foreign ownership has a negative significant relationship with conservatism. The findings of the second model (moderating effect) show that accounting standards positively moderate the nexus of corporate governance and conservatism. The study's findings are significant for a think tank that develops policies for the corporate sector in Pakistan to focus on governance, conservative accounting principles, and accounting standards for discouraging agency problems and information asymmetry.

Environmental, social and governance (ESG) factors are an effective growth phenomenon for the achievement of a firm’s objectives. The main aim of this study is to determine the impact of ESG on financial performance. The study adopts the sample of available non-financial firms listed on the Kuala Lumpur Stock Exchange of Malaysia from 2010 to 2020. The study employs two methods for calculating the dependent variable. One is an accounting-based approach and the other is market-based. This study contributes to the literature by using country-level governance factors instead of firm-level. The data is collected from Refinitiv Data-stream and WGI. This study applied GMM for the analysis of panel data. The result depicts that social and governance influence the ROA. The environmental factors increase ROE while social and governance decrease. Social and governance influence long-term market performance.The outcome of the study provides policy directions and practical implications to better understand the ESG factors.