This thesis investigates three aspects of corporate finance, namely the determinants of firm’s long term investment represented by the net capital expenditures, the determinants of firm’s short term investment represented by working capital requirements and the capital budgeting practices - all within the context of Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) markets. Despite the importance of these interrelated topics to decision makers and despite the great emphasis given to teach them in universities, few researchers investigated the determinants of both long and short term investments and out of those, most focused on developed markets. Moreover, almost all the existing studies investigated these determinants at the firm level with little evidence about macroeconomic factors. Besides, none have provided a comprehensive investigation of capital budgeting practices from a single market whether developed or emerging. Hence, this thesis completed three independent investigations. The first and second investigation presented in chapters three and four respectively, explores three categories of factors that are found in the existing literature, or predicted by this thesis to be associated with firm’s long and short term investments. These first two investigations utilize a pooled OLS regression for a panel data set covering the period from 2000 to 2014. Furthermore, the third investigation presented in chapter five explores a wide set of capital budgeting practices from a single frontier market within the GCC. Precisely, the investigation covers the development, the selection and the post completion stage of capital budgeting. It also, explores factors that are found in the existing literature or predicted by this thesis to influence the use of such practices. This investigation utilizes a survey questionnaire containing 23 questions to gather the required data. Finally, this thesis makes various contributions to the corporate finance literature. Specifically, chapter three and four extend the existing literature on the determinants of firm’s long and short term investments by examining it in the context of new emerging markets namely the GCC markets. Beside, revealing the positive effect of macroeconomic factors on firm’s investments. Chapter five extends the existing literature on capital budgeting practices by investigating three stages of these practices from the Omani market. Additionally, it provides new evidence related to the significant relation between capital budgeting practices and new firms characteristics.

The theoretical and practical importance of working capital management (Sharma & Kumar, 2011) and its strong link with the firm’s financial stability (Wang et al., 2020, p. 2; Kamel 2015, p. 35) make it one of the most important functional areas of corporate finance. Although literature and the corporate world recognize corporate sustainability mainly through corporate social responsibility (CSR), ESG emerged in the recent past and quickly made its strong footfall as an indicator of corporate sustainability. Literature is evident that studies have mainly focused on studying both working capital management (WCM) and corporate sustainability in relation to firm financial performance (FFP), while scant research has assessed the relationship between WCM and corporate sustainability (Barros et al., 2022, p. 1). The primary purpose of this study is to examine the relationship between corporate sustainability and WCM in the Swedish market to fill this gap in the literature and contribute to the existing body of knowledge on the subject matter through its findings, especially with reference to the use of ESG rating scores.  The relationship was examined through the quantitative approach. Sample data was comprised of 418 firm-year observations retrieved from Refinitiv Eikon on 38 firms listed on Nasdaq Stockholm between 2010-2020. ESG rating scores were used to measure corporate sustainability, while two proxy measures; cash conversion cycle (CCC) and working capital requirements (WCR) were for WCM. Stata software was used to find the results of the study by running the pertinent regression models using robust standard errors. Various statistical tests were performed to satisfy all the OLS classical assumptions. The empirical results of our study revealed mixed findings. The findings connected to CCC indicated no statistically significant relationship between ESG scores and CCC which allowed us to conclude that sustainable firms in Sweden do not operate with a shorter CCC (or cash cycle). The findings connected to WCR indicated a significant negative relationship of WCR with the environmental and social score, however no relationship with ESG and governance scores. These results allowed us to conclude that sustainable firms in Sweden are able to operate with WCR (or cash requirements), however, these effects entirely come from the environmental and social pillars, which indirectly implies more sustainable firms can operate with lower levels of debt than their counterparts. Since we found no significant effect from the ESG scores for both CCC and WCR, our findings were partially in line with the shareholder theory, the stakeholders’ theory, and the legitimacy theory we used as theoretical references in our study. The overall findings of our study allow us to suggest sustainable firms in Sweden reconsider their working capital policy decisions to achieve working capital efficiency (a shorter cash cycle) while staying aligned with their sustainability goals.