Is stock market development sensitive to macroeconomic indicators? A fresh evidence using ARDL bounds testing approach.

Over the past decades, emerging stock markets have started to significantly contribute to economic growth through mobilizing long-term capital by pooling funds, facilitating savings and investments into profitable projects and improving corporate governance structure. A plethora of empirical studies is devoted to investigate the determinants of different capital markets but due to highly controversial and inconclusive findings about macroeconomic determinants, this study contributes to the body of existing literature by empirically investigating the macroeconomic forces that drive the stock market development of Pakistan from 1980 to 2019. By applying Ng-Perron and Zivot-Andrews unit root tests (to determine the integrating orders of variables) and Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) bounds testing approach, our results confirm cointegration among variables and exhibit the significant positive impact of economic growth and banking sector development on stock market development and negative affect of inflation, foreign direct investment and trade openness on it in long run. At the same time, the short run results show a significant relationship of economic growth, inflation and foreign direct investment with stock market development. Our study has some important policy implications.

Personality Traits and Entrepreneurial Intentions: Financial Risk-Taking as Mediator.

The interaction between environment and individual personality determines career. Over the past decades, the role of personality traits in explaining entrepreneurship cannot get much attention of researchers. To fill this gap, this study aims to investigate the effect of personality traits (extraversion, openness to experience, conscientiousness, neuroticism, and agreeableness) on the entrepreneurial intentions (EI) along with the mediating role of financial risk taking (FRT). Sample size consists of 500 students of business and management of different universities of Pakistan, out of which 466 useable questionnaires were collected and analyzed. The results of the study are consistent with conventional wisdom as explored by past studies. In line with past studies and proposed hypothesis, we found that both extraversion and openness to experience have a positive association with FRT, whereas neuroticism, conscientiousness, and agreeableness have negative association with FRT. The results also revealed that there is positive association between FRT and EI; however, FRT did not mediate the relationship between agreeableness and EI.

Impact of Online Advertisement on Customer Satisfaction With the Mediating Effect of Brand Knowledge.

The purpose of this article is to explain how online advertising affects customer satisfaction through the mediation of brand knowledge. The sample size of this survey is based on 100 participants in the Multan region. This study collects data by conducting various unstructured interviews. In this study, we used a qualitative data acquisition technique. The results show that online advertising does not have a significant impact on customer satisfaction. However, when brand knowledge is included as a parameter, the correlation between online advertising and customer satisfaction increases. Online advertising is a new advertising tool used by most organizations. This manuscript helps practitioners choose better tools for online promotion and uses a variety of recognition techniques to improve their brand knowledge. It has been known through this study, that building customer confidence in product quality is a very effective approach in front of business owners, as brand reputation enhances customer satisfaction. This study is unique in that previous studies considered elements of brand knowledge as parameters and ignored to find a direct relationship between online advertising and customer satisfaction. This study highlights key points that will help emerging researchers critically analyze such aspects in future studies.