Muhammad Akram Naseem

Association between Reward and Employee Motivation: A Case Study Banking Sector of Pakistan

This study examines the association between rewards and employee motivation in banking sector of Pakistan. The study is based on primary data and sample Size (N=167) consisted of male and female employees of 19 different banks. Primary data collected by structured questionnaire by using sort of different approaches. Two different hypotheses was developed for the present study and was tested by applying Chi square Test and Regression Test. Significant value is 0.048 of Pearson Chi-square its mean there is association between salary and gender. The correlation between rewards and Employee Motivation is 0.546, which shows the positive relationship between reward and employee motivation. Regression Equation shows that when the reward is made on the basic of Employee point of view; Employee Motivation will increased by 0.527. The results also showed that salary is much important factor for employee motivation as compared to other variable factors like promotion, job security, working condition, appreciation and other benefits.

Performance Evaluation of Mutual Funds

The aim of conducting this research is to find out the investment tendency in mutual funds of Pakistan, Conventional vs. Islamic. The study is also aimed at finding out the role of mutual fund investment in Pakistan. This study also finds out the factors effecting the investment in mutual funds and measure the performance of mutual funds through the models which are used worldwide to evaluate the investment tendency in the area of mutual funds through portfolio (Risk/Return) Sharpe Measure and Treynor Measure, to make the best point for investment through graphical representation for both conventional and Islamic, which is much easier to take better decision for investment either sell or buy.

Capital Structure and Corporate Governance

Capital structure determination is considered as one of the key corporate financing decisions and managers often face difficulty in finding the optimal one. There are various theories regarding this phenomenon in the finance literature and this issue has been discussed since long. No theory can be regarded as the conclusive one as varying evidences found regarding this complex issue. Presently, the need to determine an optimal capital structure has become more troublesome as well as important due to the emergence of a need of the best corporate governance practices. To mitigate agency problem, the organizations may implement code of corporate governance. This study aims to investigate about the impact of corporate governance on capital structure determination. Secondly, this study focuses on three well known capital structure theories i.e. trade-off theory, agency theory and pecking-order theory. Quantitative research design is used for this empirical study. Sample consists of panel data of the non-financial sector companies listed at Pakistan Stock Exchange for five years 2009-2013. The data of the variables of interest are collected from annual reports published by companies and the publications of State Bank of Pakistan. The companies are selected by taking a representative sample from the whole non-financial sector. Stratified Random Sampling technique is used by taking 10% of each sector and final selected firms are 40.Then, simple random sampling technique is used for the selection of a representative sample by using random number method. Panel data analysis and Hausman test reveal that fixed effects model is better than other options and Board size has a significant impact on Debt to equity ratio in positive direction in case of Pakistani firms operating in nonfinancial sector. We may infer that Pakistani firms have positive relationship between managerial ownership and capital structure. Since this relationship is insignificant in all regressions. The negative relationship of return on assets (ROA) and debt to equity ratio suggests that Pakistani firms earn higher returns on assets and such firms rely more on internal financing resulting in less use of debt, strong negative association has been found between liquidity and debt to equity whereas the relationship with firm size is observed negative as well as insignificant. The findings of this study can help to policy makers to give importance to Board size as it is an important determinant of capital structure as larger the size of board is, the better the monitoring and decision making process

Transparency and Financing Choices of Family Firms

Past literature indicates that family firms were different from nonfamily firms in term of performance, governess and disclosure. But there was very little evidence which specified the financial structure of family firm. Maturity and leverage, two proxies are used to examine the financial structure of family firm in this particular study. This study shows that family firms are different from non-family firms in terms of debt maturity and leverage. Moreover, transparency is negatively related to maturity which indicates that more transparency decreases maturity, while family firms have more debt maturity which suggested that family firms are more relying on long-term debt and there is a chance of expropriation in family firms due to less transparency. Furthermore, transparency is positively related with leverage which indicates that more transparency increases leverage, while family firms also have positive relationship with leverage which specifies that more transparency leads family firms’ financial structure more toward debt.

Econometric estimation of banking stocks

Bank stocks have been considered to be lucrative equity investments in Stock exchanges operating in Pakistan, over the recent time period. Sudden fluctuations in stock prices within a short period have always been a matter of great concern for investors. Since, investors want to take care of advantage they potentially yield from the organization by means of investing in shares; therefore, they tend to be keenly interested in making predictions about their future prices so that their objective of wealth maximization can be achieved. This motive makes forecasting of stocks an interesting topic to be explored empirically. This brought the motivation to study a sample of five big banks (known as Big Five) of Pakistan for predicting their stock prices. The data of stock prices for selected banks has been collected over about a decade from the official website of Karachi Stock Exchange (KSE). For prediction of stocks, moving average, exponential smoothing, time series regression etc. are the most commonly used linear methods. Out of them, the most renowned and widely used linear method is Autoregressive Integrated Moving Average (ARIMA), also known as Box-Jenkins’s Technique. It was proposed by Box and Jenkins in 1976. Despite of being a linear method, it is more flexible in terms of representing various versions of time series as such Autoregressive (AR), Moving Average (MA), combined AR and MA series (ARIMA). Findings revealed that MCB and BOP has found to have maximum number of observations while HBL in this regard, ranking lowest in the group. Distributions of all stocks are found positively skewed while distribution of stocks of each bank is non-normally distributed which may be evident from Jarque–Bera test. Since values of stocks of our sample banks are found highly fluctuated, probably, due to some specific trend, therefore, to predict the future values of stocks, different ARIMA models have been developed here by using Box-Jenkins approach. Accordingly, after identification, estimation, and application of various diagnostic checks, ARIMA(1,1,0) was found to be suitable for prediction of stock of ABL, HBL and MCB. On the other hand, ARIMA(1,1,1) was found to be appropriate for BOP and UBL stocks’ prediction. To address the issue of uncertainty and underlying risk present in securities investments, present study is highly significant for the prospective investors to decide as to which bank they should consider for investment thereby making their expected returns realize.

Does Inflation Hurt the Stock Market Returns

This paper examines the impact of high inflation on stock market returns in Pakistan. For this purpose, a monthly data of inflation and stock returns is collected from 2005-2009. A simple linear regression model is applied to determine the impact of inflation on stock returns. The results show that there is negative and significant impact of inflation on stock returns.

Comparison of the Return on Equity and Measure of Risk by Studying Two Power Companies of the Developing Nations

The comparative study is based on the two large IPPs of India and Pakistan. The annual profits and return on equity (RoE) ratios are compared and analyzed. The study indicated that though the annual profits of both companies differ yet both the countries have equal return on equity ratios. The study also finds strong positive correlation between net profit and RoE. Furthermore, the beta coefficient is also studied and compared for both the IPPs. Both countries were found to have huge potential for private investment in energy sector.

Factors of Employee Retention: A Case Study of Pakistan Foam Industry

The basic objective of this study is to identify the main factors of employee retention in Foam industry of Pakistan and also impact of variables like (career prospects, job security, employer attitude and working environment) on employee retention. This study is based on primary data, which collected from 81 employees of five leading Foam Companies of Pakistan. For this purpose we self designed questionnaire was used for data collection. The data was analyzed using the techniques of correlation coefficient and regression analysis. Cronach-Alpha reliability is 78%, 86%, 74%and 74% respectively career prospects, job security, employer attitude and working g environment. The following are the reasons (career development, job security, working conditions and employer attitude) for which employee wants to stay in Foam industry Pakistan. The 61.2% respondent want to spending their career with their company, which shows that main factor of employee retention, is career prospects and second factor of employee retention is job security. The p-values of four factors of employee retention is less than .05, so rejected the statement of hypothesis (H0) and accepted H1. There is positive impacts and relationship between employee retention and career prospectus, job security, working environment & employer attitude. These results are consistent with prior empirical study.