Liberal Narrative in Pakistan about India, and its Effect on Universities Students’ Perception towards Terrorism

The key objective of this paper is to find the relationship between the liberal narratives in Pakistan on relationship with India and its effects on universities students’ perception of terrorism. There is a consensus among some prominent scholars that right wing political parties, security establishment and big media houses are producing a kind of national security narrative based on the troika; India as security threat to Pakistan, Islam as rallying cry for national cohesion, and support from great powers to finance ambitious security dominated foreign policy about the neighboring countries that does not help in counter-terrorism at home. This paper has adopted quantitative research method. It is a descriptive study and data was collected from four major public sector universities through survey questionnaires. The liberal narrative on India is weaker in Punjab on all issues. The findings of liberal narratives on India reject the claims of existing literature that there is a positive relationship between liberal narrative about India in Pakistan and counter-terrorism measures in FATA. Three variables researched in case study of Afghanistan reject the existing literature that there is a positive relationship between liberal narrative and counter-terrorism measures.

Corporate Frauds: Factors Eliciting Fraud Behavior and Firms Financial Prospects

This dissertation expands the existing corporate fraud literature by providing an insight into the causes and consequences of corporate fraud in Pakistan. Four specific issues are studied in the context of Pakistan through interconnected ob jectives. Mentioning the first objective, the dissertation examines key factors elic iting fraudulent behavior of firms involved. The results indicate that among the variables proxied for internal antecedent factors, firm performance, organizational slack, organization size, tax aggressiveness and chief executive officer compensa tion significantly increase the probability of fraud occurrence. The results for the external antecedent factors indicate that dynamic environment and political connections are identified as connected with the likeliness of fraud commission. Lastly, with reference to monitoring variables, transient institutional investors, an outsider on board of directors, board size, the tenure of the chief executive officer and auditor change increase the fraud likeliness. Referring to the second objective, the study focuses on examining changes in cor porate financial decisions (i.e., financing, investment, and dividend payouts) with their interdependent and inter-temporal nature on fraud. Applying system-of equations the study finds that financing, investment, and dividend payouts of the fraudulent firms decrease following the revelation of fraud. Moreover, the results for the simultaneity of corporate financial triad reflect that corporate financing, investment, and dividend payouts are jointly determined. It is observed that in in vestment decision and payout decision variables the inter-temporal nature prevails which is likely to create an omitted variable bias. The results provide conformity to the flow of fund framework. In addition, the study finds that firms experience hurdles in raising funds from external capital markets but, on average, investment and cash flow remain uncon nected while considering the financial constraint status of sample firms. Instead, they alter their net debt from cash flow changes and protect their capital expen ditures. To all appearances, pecking order is involved concerning how firms use their cash flows. In the third objective, the study dissects the response of violations announce ments on the market liquidity of corresponding firms. Estimation of five liquidity xi measures is performed to test the market response on days around a violation announcement. The study reveals that the quoted and effective spread (in cents) identify the deterioration status of liquidity on days subsequent to the violations’ announcement, throughout the analysis period. Estimating the simultaneous sys tem of equation, the study examines the impact of deteriorated liquidity on stock returns surrounding the day of violations’ announcement. The analysis imparts a decline in liquidity after the violations announcements and that abnormal return in the post-violation period relatively is greatly responsive to the change in ex pected spread. Lastly, in respect of the fourth objective, the study investigates the post-fraud behavior of fraudulent firms to restore the corporate legitimacy. For this pur pose, the study considers the changes in governance mechanism as ameliorating actions to improve the earning quality. The study finds that improved gover nance mechanism brings better performance in stock price while controlling for earnings performance. The last chapter of the dissertation discusses conclusions, implications, and limitations.