The determinants of audit fees and report lag: A comparative study of Egypt and the UK Despite the occurrence of recent economic and political events such as the global financial crisis and Arab spring in the Middle East, researchers have not addressed the effects of such events on the auditing profession. That is has given a motive to this study to explore this point of research. This study has three main objectives. The first objective is to investigate the determinants of audit fees and audit report timeliness in the Egyptian and UK contexts. The second objective is to point out how the economic and political events could affect these determinants. The third objective is to make a comparison between the response of auditors towards economic and political instability in both countries. These objectives are set to solve the research problem of this study which is to investigate how the price behaviour of audit fees and report timeliness can vary in two different contexts: Egypt and the UK, and to highlight how auditors respond to such economic (Global Financial Crisis) and political events (Egyptian Revolution). A special attention has been addressed to tourism industry while investigating audit pricing and timeliness decisions throughout this study for two reasons. First, tourism industry play a critical role for the economy of many developing and developed countries. Second, tourism industry is highly affected by any economic and political events. For these reasons, tourism industry is surrounded by high risk during the economic or political instability, and thus this might result in special procedures and decisions taken by the auditors regarding tourism industry clients during instable periods. To take into account the most recent economic and political events, the study sample covers the period of six financial years from 2008 to 2013. This sample period has been chosen to capture the global financial crisis that has taken place during 2008-2009 and also to investigate the effects of the Egyptian revolution that has taken place on January 25, 2011, and subsequent political events. The study sample includes 212 Egyptian companies listed in the Egyptian stock market and the top 350 companies (FTSE 350) listed in the London Stock Exchange. For guaranteeing the preciseness of the findings, advanced panel data Prais-Winsten statistical analysis technique has been used throughout this study. Results of this study reveal consistency between Egypt and UK in most signs of coefficients of audit fees determinants. However, a lot of differences exist between the audit report lag determinants in the Egyptian and UK context that suggest that a one-size-fits-all approach cannot be generalized in audit report lag determinants for various countries. Despite that tourism is a very risky industry that is easily affected by economic and political instability, results reported in Egypt and UK reveal that audit fees charged and audit delay reported for tourism did not differ from other industries in both contexts. Results also reveal that Big N auditing firms in the UK have competitive advantages of not charging an audit fee premium and offering a more timely audit report than non-big N. These advantages increase the demand of Big N in the UK and increase their dominance. On the other side, in Egypt, Big N auditing firms do not offer such advantage of timely audit reports than non-big N, besides, they charge their clients with audit fee premium. That enabled medium sized and small auditing firms to penetrate the Egyptian auditing market and increase their market share, and thus, Big N dominance is not high in the Egyptian audit market as that in the UK. Different auditor responses to global financial crisis (GFC) have been documented in both countries. As auditors in Egypt decreased their audit fees and offered more timely audit report to face the economic recession and the anxiety of investors accompanied with the GFC. However, neither the pricing of auditing services nor the audit report lag have been affected during the GFC in the UK audit market. According to the results of this study, during the Egyptian Revolution, auditors tended to charge audit fees premium without increasing/decreasing audit delay. This implies that the increase in audit fees during revolution was a risk premium due to the instability in economic and political conditions and was not accompanied by any increase in audit effort and delay.

The international financial environment has become riskier due to the recent developments in product offerings and failure of regulation to keep abreast with these changes. The Global Financial Crisis exposed inadequacies of regulation, thus consensus on the need for comprehensive and uniform regulation was made by G-20 member states. Imposing exchange trading, clearing, reporting and capital requirements on the derivatives market are some of the ways of dealing with the problems caused by lax regulatory oversight. In this study, through the comparative analysis of derivatives regulation in South Africa, Brazil, India and Turkey, it was established that emerging countries are taking active steps to implement the G-20 agreement. Uniformity in the core rules was noted, with differences in the supportive legislation. Country specific rules which support the macroeconomic factors that are faced by these countries and the infrastructure available for regulatory execution are used amongst countries. The study concluded that current regulation in emerging countries is accommodative and regulatory differences are in line with economic factors in each country.

This thesis used the events of the 2007 financial crisis as a means of being able to add to the research already done on South African unit trusts. The objective was to study the risk-adjusted performance of South African general equity unit trusts against the market during the period between 2005 and 2014. This period took into account the bull market preceding the financial crisis, the market crash of 2007 and the subsequent market recovery that followed. Data was obtained online through the I-Net BFA data base and included 161 general equity unit trusts that contained a full data set. In addition to the general equity unit trusts, the Satrix40 was studied to compare a passive unit trust against those that are actively managed. The 10 year Government bond was also used as a risk-free rate to add to the comparisons of performance results. The Sharpe, Treynor and Jensen measures were applied to the data with the results adding more support to the opinions that markets are fairly efficient and active investment strategies are being challenged by consistently well performing passive investments. Throughout the duration of the study, taking into account the varying economic cycles, the Satrix40 passive investment showed the best average overall return on simple return calculations as well as during the risk-adjusted measurements. In support of active investment management, unit trusts showed their best relative performance figures during the period of the financial crisis. This suggested that active financial managers were able to make the active calls necessary to weather the storm of the financial crisis. While the study did have its limitations, the results it produced are intended to offer investors further knowledge in enabling them to make more educated investment decisions in the future.

The explosion of the global financial crisis in 2007-08 reignited the urgency to reflect on the origins and causes of financial collapses. As the above events kick-started an economic meltdown that is still ongoing, comparisons with the Great Crash of 1929 started to abound. In particular, the externalities that a broad spectrum of societal groups had to bear as a consequence of various banking failures highlighted the necessity of a more inclusive and balanced regulation of firms whose activities impact on a wide range of stakeholders.The thesis is centred on the proposal of a paradigm, the “enlightened sovereign control”, that provides a theoretical, institutional and substantive framework as a response to the legal issues analysed in the thesis. These stem primarily from the analysis of two sequences of events (the 2001-03 wave of “accounting frauds” and the 2007-08 global crisis) which represent the background upon which modern financial scandals are explained. This is done by highlighting a number of common denominators emerging from the case studies (Enron and Parmalat, Northern Rock and Lehman Brothers) which caused financial instability and scandals. The research is grounded on the initial recognition of theoretical themes in the field of corporate and financial law, which eventually link with the more practical events examined. This parallel enquiry leads to the investigation of two heavily interrelated spheres of law and finally highlights more practical legal issues that emerge from the analysis.Through this multifaceted approach, the thesis contends that the occurrence of financial crises during the last decade is essentially rooted in two main problems: a corporate governance one, represented by the lack of effective control systems within large public firms; and a corporate finance one identified with the excesses of financial innovation and related abuses of capital market finance. Research conducted in this thesis ultimately seeks to contribute to current debates in the areas of corporate and financial law, through the proposals of the “enlightened sovereign control” paradigm.

The first aim of this thesis is to tackle the deficiencies within the system of financial regulation. Furthermore, it aims to assess the submitted and even the already adopted proposals. The aims cannot be achieved without an analysis of the causes of the global financial crisis 2007-2009, because it helps to understand a range of deficiencies in the system of financial regulation. A global financial crisis of that magnitude cannot be traced to a single cause but was instead the result of multiple interconnected causes, which are examined at the macroeconomic as well as microeconomic level.

This paper will study the Art market as an investment opportunity. We will forget about the artistic characteristics of the market (history of art, aesthetic, technic...) and focus only on the business and economic aspects of the market treating art works as tradable goods. Our goal will be to determine whether or not the art market would be a suitable investment vehicle, offering some interesting outlook to investment diversification. This paper will pay a closer look at the recent financial crisis period, trying to understand the mechanism which bonds the financial industry and the Art industry. This will be the key to introduce an investment portfolio including Art as an asset class for investment. Focusing on the performance of such portfolio we will give some further recommendation on how to reach a better than expected performance.

The thesis brings self-contained review of the bank regulation and control. The first part deals with the theory of the bank regulation and control and then the regulation and control of the bank sector in the Czech Republic is introduced. Next part deals with the brief analysis of the formation and development of the global financial crisis in the USA and chosen European countries. The last part introduces the changes in the field of the bank regulation and control that arose after the break out of the finacial crisis in the European Union. The conclusion of the thesis to a certain degree includes the attutide of the Czech Government and the Czech National Bank towards the newly introduced arrangements.

Magister Commercii - MCom / The drastic decline in stock prices on the 24th October 1929 sent a frantic wave of panic across the US. Merely a century later, on the 29th September 2008 another financial crisis hit the globe - this time leaving most countries devastated. The main objective of this study is twofold: 1) to determine whether leading indicators have sufficient predictive capacity to predict global financial crises; and 2) to use the Efficient Market Theory (EMT) and/ or Behavioural Finance Theory (BFT) as a means of developing a theory explaining the potential impact bad public announcements had on the level of investor confidence before the 1929 Great Depression and the 2008 Global Financial Crisis. This study was not only designed to qualitatively conceptualise the notion of the term “investor confidence” whilst drawing special attention to its frailty using the 1929 Great Depression and the 2008 Global Financial Crisis, but also assist governments, reserve banks and key institutions to develop effective strategies of mitigating the effects of the latter financial crisis as well as provide guidance on how another financial crisis can be prevented. This study extracted bad public announcements from 40 books and 60 journal articles using 6 NBER-based leading economic indicators (LEI) and 4 systematic risk-based leading non-economic indicators (LNEI) in order to: 1) qualitatively assess the extent to which leading indicators can be used to predict global financial crises 3 – 8 months in advance; and 2) use the EMT and/ or BFT to provide an explanation concerning the potential impact that bad public announcements had on the level of investor confidence before the 1929 Great Depression and the 2008 Global Financial Crisis.

This research examines the impact of external shocks on Nigeria’s output performance for the period 1981 – 2015. It aims to bring to the fore the importance of considering external shocks during policy design and implementation. The multivariate VAR and VECM frameworks were used to evaluate the impact of the shock variables on Nigeria’s output performance and to achieve the stated objectives. Findings show that the external shock and domestic policy variables have short-run effects on Nigeria’s output performance. Also, all the measures of external shocks and domestic policies display some viable information in explaining the variabilities in Nigeria’s output performance over the horizon. The comparison between the results of the VECM and the unrestricted VAR shows that the unrestricted VAR model outperformed the VECM. The overall result of the study confirms the view about the vulnerability of the Nigerian economy to external shocks. These shocks explain more than half of the variance in real output performance and have varying effects on output performance in Nigeria. The dynamic response of output performance to each of the defined shock variables show that output performance responds rapidly to the shock variables, while its response to the domestic economic variables is seemingly moderate. Finally, the variance decomposition show that international crude oil price and terms of trade have the largest share in accounting for the variability in output performance, followed closely by the shares of capital inflows and monetary policy.

Thesis (MA)--Stellenbosch University, 2014. / ENGLISH ABSTRACT: Despite their lack of merits and demands, Occupy Wall Street (OWS) did become a defining feature in the short aftermath of the Financial Crisis and a part of the global occupy-movements during the protest year of 2011. As the founders and organisers behind the first encampments in Zuccotti Park called out for a "Tahrir moment" in the United States of America (US), few scholars or pundits had seen the leaderless movement coming. OWS spread across the US in the matter of months, hitting the media headlines gradually and more rapidly than any previous protest movement. Scholarly responses to OWS have been plentiful, and their categorisations of the OWS’ structure, demands and impact have been going in many different directions. This study attempts to debate and analyse the main research question; is OWS a new kind of a social movement? Even though there are several ways in which one may approach this question, the following will focus on the organisational structures, the political opportunity structures and the global linkages of OWS. The organisational structures has been debated by most, as the movement has a leaderless structure, it is ruled by consensus and supported by protesters from all social spheres, who came, protested and left as they pleased. The political and economic deficits, which gives way to the political opportunity structures of the movement, has not been this dramatic since the Great Depression. The Financial Crisis of 2008 has not only been defined as an economic crisis, but also a crisis of representative democracy. Furthermore, the global protest movements of 2011 have been similar in several ways. Even as all of them, be it Tahrir, 15M, in Greece or OWS, has been unique in matters of context, time and space, they share similarities in tactics, methods and fundamental demands - democracy and prosperity. The concluding statement to the research question is not clear-cut. Rather, it revokes former debates, which distinguished between old and new social movements, and implements a globalising civil society. A new kind of a social movement has come and gone, with elements of the earlier movements. It has added new modes of tactics, structures and demands, all formed by the present context. OWS is not an exception. / AFRIKAANSE OPSOMMING: Ten spyte van hul gebrek aan eise en tasbare sukses, het “Occupy Wall Street (OWS) wel ’n definiërende kenmerk geword tydens kort naloop van die Finansiële Krisies, asook ’n deel van die globale beset-bewegings tydens die 2011 protesjaar. Daar was min akademici en kenners wat, ten tye van die eerste kamperings in Zuccotti Park en die eis deur die stigters en organiseerders van OWS vir ’n “Tahrir oomblik”, die opkoms van hierdie leierlose beweging voorsien het. Binne ’n kwessie van maande het OWS dwarsoor die VSA versprei, eers stadig en daarna vinniger die hoofopskrifte van die media gehaal as enige ander protes-beweging wat dit voorafgegaan het. Daar is heelwat akademiese bydraes (uit verskillende dissiplines) wat daarop gemik is om OWS te verstaan in terme van hoe om dit te kategoriseer, die struktuur daarvan, die eise wat gestel is en die impak daarvan. Die doel van hierdie studie is om die hoofnavorsingsvraag te bespreek en analiseer, naamlik; is OWS ’n nuwe soort sosiale beweging? Die benadering wat gevolg word is om te fokus om organisatoriese strukture, politieke geleentheidstrukture and die globale verbintenisse van OWS. Die organisatoriese strukture het die meeste aandag gekry in die literatuur tot dusver, aangesien die organisasie ’n leierlose struktuur het. Besluite word deur middel van konsensus geneem en ondersteuning word gewerf van protesteerders uit ’n verskeidenheid van sosiale sfere. Hierdie protesteerders het opgedaag, protes aangeteken, en weer vertrek na willekeur. Die politieke en ekonomiese terkortkominge van die kapitalistiese stelsel in die VSA, waarin die politieke geleentheidstrukture van die beweging geanker is, was, sedert die Groot Depressie, nie so skynbaar dramaties nie. Die Finansiële Krisies wat in 2008 sy hoogtepunt bereik het, word gedefinieer nie alleen as ’n ekonomiese krisies nie,maar ook as ’n krisies van verteenwoordigende demokrasie. Daarby is daar bevind dat die globale protesbewegings wat in 2011 gedy het, soortgelyke kenmerke gehad het. Nieteenstaande die feit dat Tahrir in Egipte, 15M, die Griekse protes-aksies en OWS wel as uniek gesien kan word in terme van konteks, tyd en ruimte, is daar ooreenkomste in taktiek, metodes en fundamentele eise: deelnemende demokrasie en welvaart vir almal. Die slotsom waartoe die tesis kom is nie definitief nie. Eerder, is die gevolgtrekking dat daar teruggegaan moet word na vorige debatte wat onderskeid getref het tussen ou en nuwe sosiale bewegings, en ook na die literatuur oor die moontlikheid van ’n globale burgerlike samelewing. Wat wel vasstaan is dat ’n nuwe soort sosiale beweging verskyn het en weer gekwyn het, wat aspekte van vorige bewegings omvat maar ook in duidelike terme van hulle verskil. In die opsig is OWS nie ’n uitsondering nie, met nuwe taktiek, strukture en eise wat almal gevorm is binne die huidige konteks.