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Abd Halim Ahmad · Nur Adiana Hiau Abdullah · Kamarun Nisham Taufil Mohd ·International Journal of Economics and Management ·2022 ·JEL: G33, G32, G34

This study examined the effects of institutional factors, including; board size, blockholder ownership, and political connections, as some of the determinants (apart from various company-level financial variables) on the outcomes of financially distressed listed companies in Malaysia. A highly concentrated ownership structure is common in most developing countries, including Malaysia. Besides, Malaysia has a unique disclosure environment where all listed companies must release relevant and adequate information to the public to improve investors' protection and corporate transparency. Therefore, Practice Notes which are standards and measures for Malaysian Listed Companies, are designed to help listed companies that are financially distressed to restructure their debts within a stipulated time, giving them sufficient time to re-emerge in the exchange. The logistic regression analysis results on a sample of financially distressed Malaysian public listed companies suggested that; interest coverage ratio, stock returns, blockholder ownership, and political connections were significance at the 5% level. The institutional variables suggested that blockholder ownership and political connectedness had a positive and significant effect on the possibility of companies emerging from financially distressed conditions. The findings have provided important practical implications for managers and potential investors in their risk management decisions.

Rosmaria Jaffar · Chek Derashid · Roshaiza Taha ·Journal of Asian Finance, Economics and Business ·2021 ·JEL: H25, H26, M41

The purpose of this study is to examine the level of aggressive tax planning (ATP) among companies listed in the Access, Certainty, Efficiency (ACE) Market of Bursa Malaysia. On top of that, this study also investigates the relationship between company characteristics, ethnicity, and ATP. This study uses a balanced pooled sample of 105 firm years-observations for the period from 2014 to 2018. These samples were selected to provide new insight into this market and to explore the attitude of small firms toward ATP in Malaysia. The data was retrieved from DataStream and the downloaded annual reports. The finding shows that profitability and financial distress have a significant relationship with ATP. Other variables including size, capital intensity, inventory intensity, leverage, and ethnicity, were not determinants of ATP. The result in this study may assist the reader in understanding the nature of companies in the ACE market, particularly on its behavior toward tax planning. A strict requirement is needed to be adopted in the sample selection process, thus limiting the sample size. Further, since the previous study focused on large companies, the discussion of this paper will provide new insight into the nature of tax planning within the small- and medium-sized companies in Malaysia.

Dung V. Dinh · Robert J. Powell · Duc H. Vo ·Journal of Asian Economics ·2021 ·JEL: G33, G28

This study is conducted to investigate the prediction of corporate financial distress based on the Merton (1974) market-based Distance to Default (DD) model over the period from 1997 to 2016 which covers a range of economic financial circumstances, including the Asian Financial Crisis (AFC) and Global Financial Crisis (GFC). The study focusses on the six largest countries in the ASEAN Economic Community (AEC), comprising of Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam. Unlike previous studies which focus mainly on bankruptcy, this paper focusses on early warning distress indicators that signal distress well before bankruptcy. This is when firms experience difficulty in servicing debt as measured by interest coverage ratio (ICR) at a firm level and non-performing loans (NPLs) at a country level. Key empirical findings from this paper indicate that the market-based distance-to-default (DD) model is generally a good early warning indicator of financial distress in the following year, particularly for ICR, but that prediction accuracy varies between individual countries in the Southeast Asian region.