On the causality analysis of the correlation between financial leverage and systematic risk: evidence from Indonesian Stock Exchange

The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia is strongly committed to stimulating savings culture in the local community by providing financial literacy in financial planning, investments, and budgeting. Inculcating the savings and investment behavior among the people will help materialize one of the elements of Saudi Vision 2030. Tadawul, being the most liquid stock market in the Middle East and North Africa, offers investors the ability to grow their capital with confidence through facilitating trading in different securities such as equities, debt instruments, and Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs). There is a great scope for investors to invest in the companies listed in Tadawul All Share Index (TASI) due to its strong economic fundamentals. The present study aims to apply the CAPM in Tadawul listed stocks, which will help in understanding the systematic and unsystematic risk associated with stocks, understanding their actual and theoretical return on stocks. The methodology adopted is the analysis of secondary data for all listed stocks in Tadawul using the Bloomberg terminal. The financial valuation includes elements like beta, alpha, correlation and standard deviation, expected return and actual return. The practical value obtained from the study will help investors go for undervalued stocks with lower beta, higher expected annual return, and lower systematic risks. Thus, the result shows the predicting power in KSA market and the scope for long-term investments by the investors to boost their savings and investment behavior and materialize one element of Vision 2030.

Acknowledgment
This research was funded by the Deanship of Scientific Research at Princess Nourah bint Abdulrahman University through the Fast-Track Research Funding Program.

Estimation of systematic risk is one of the important aspects of the best investment decisions. Through systematic risk prediction will be known risks to be faced by investors, because systematic risk is a measure of investment risk. In addition to returns, investors always consider the risk of investment, because investors are rational individuals, ie individuals who always consider the trade-off between return and risk. At a certain level of return, investors will tend to choose investments with the lowest risk level. Conversely, at a certain level of risk, investors tend to choose investments with the highest return rate. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the influence of the financial information on the systematic risk of stock manufacturing companies listed on the Indonesia Stock Exchange over a period of five years from January 2011 to December 2015. The financial information is measured in four accounting variables, i.e. financial leverage, liquidity, profitability, and firm size. The results of data analysis using multiple linear regression method to prove that at the 0.05 level only variable sized companies that significantly influence systematic risk. Meanwhile, the variable financial leverage, liquidity, and profitability does not affect the systematic risk. The results showed inconsistencies with the results of several previous studies. This inconsistency may be due to measurement problems variable accounting, the implementation period of the study, and the use of different research samples.

Transparency is a challenge for public administration reforms for now and beyond towards modern and better governance. The economic crisis that occurred has led to a large erosion of public confidence in the effectiveness of government financial management. This study aims to analyze the key elements of local government transparency in new public governance. The research data was obtained through financial reports on local government websites. The sample selection technique used purposive judgment sampling and yielded a total of 262 local governments in Indonesia. The analytical method used is logistic regression analysis. The results showed that key elements, reflected by the local government size and local financial independence ratio, had a significant influence on the implementation of internet financial reporting, while audit opinions do not have a significant effect. This is due to changes in public perception of the quality of audit opinions provided by the Audit Board. This study emphasizes that local governments that receive a fair or unfair audit opinion cannot prove with certainty that the local government has performed good or poor financial management. Audit opinions obtained by local governments do not always facilitate the publication of financial statements on their official websites.