مهدی صفری گرایلی

The present study aims to investigate the association between political connections and related-party transactions for the firms listed on the Tehran Stock Exchange (TSE). Sample includes the 485 firm-year observations from companies listed on the Tehran Stock Exchange during the years 2013 to 2017 and research hypothesis was tested using multivariate regression model based on panel data.We find that political connections are negatively associated with related-party transactions. In other words, politically connected firms are less inclined to exercise opportunistic behaviours by related-party transactions in comparison to other firms. Moreover, additional analysis reveals that the negative relationship between political connections and related-party transactions is more pronounced in larger firms.Our findings not only extend the extant theoretical literature concerning the stock political economy in developing countries including emerging capital market of Iran, but also help investors, managers, capital market regulators, policy makers and accounting standard setters to make informed decisions.

Corporate integrity is considered as part of the company's development strategies, which in the long run can lead to the increased firms' financial transparency to stakeholders. The purpose of our study is to present a corporate integrity model and, then to investigate its effect on firms' information asymmetry. In this study, to measure the corporate integrity, we use Meta-synthesis and Delphi analysis in the qualitative part. Then, in the quantitative section, the corporate integrity questionnaires were sent to the managers of the sample firms. Subsequently, a total of 138 questionnaires were completed and sent back, which were used as the final samples for analysis. In addition, information asymmetry is measured using the three different proxies, namely bid-ask spread, turnover, and Amihud illiquidity measure. Our findings show a significant and negative effect of corporate integrity on information asymmetry. This results suggest that corporate integrity, by promoting behavioral values based on truthfulness and commitment, the structures will enhance the corporate governance mechanisms and, thereby, firstly motivate the managers to reduce the agency gap and, secondly, implement a more effective level of the supervisions on the firm's performances in front of the stakeholders by accelerating the circulation of information and giving timely and reliable feedback to the stakeholders. This is the first study that presents a corporate integrity model through qualitative analysis and then, investigates the effect of corporate integrity on firms' information asymmetry. Therefore, our study can contribute to the extant literature of this context.

There has not been presented any comprehensive index for Corporate Governance in spite of its crucial role in resolution and responsiveness. Although diverse methods have been sought for measuring the Corporate Governance in the previous studies, in this study, a comprehensive index is proposed for measuring Corporate Governance taking other indexes into account through mathematical equations. For testing the designed model’s functionality, a set of data related to 149 firms from 2014 to 2019 has been used jointly, too. To do so, a questionnaire, which asks the experts their idea about the weight and significance of the criteria of measuring the Corporate Governance of the firm, is made and distributed and the weight and significance of the criteria were determined through one method of multi-criteria decision model (Shannon Entropy). To measure the changeable hidden relationship which exists in this study of the Corporate Governance, provided with the measurement items, a confirmatory factorial analysis was taken, too; results show that the supposed model has been a proper index for Corporate Governance. This mixed index includes criteria such as the board of directors' size, independence, meetings, and its education, the CEO's permanence, the size, independence, financial specialty, financial experience, tenure and the meetings of the auditors hip committee, ownership concentration, organizational ownership, governmental ownership, deals with the dependent persons, the quality of the disclosure, proper information and weaknesses if the internal controls,