Comparative Research on Earnings Management, Corporate Governance, and Economic Value

Comparative Research on Earnings Management, Corporate Governance, and Economic Value
Author: Elisabete S. Vieira
Publisher:
Total Pages: 460
Release: 2021
Genre: Accounting
ISBN: 9781799875963

"This book discusses the accounting policies firms use in different opportunistic circumstances in order to manage earnings, and to understand the corporate governance practices in different countries, and its relationship to firms' performance, and other dimensions of companies"--

The Effects of Competition

The Effects of Competition
Author: George Symeonidis
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 558
Release: 2002-01-18
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 9780262264655

A theoretical and empirical study of the effects of competition across a broad range of industries. Policies to promote competition are high on the political agenda worldwide. But in a constantly changing marketplace, the effects of more intense competition on firm conduct, market structure, and industry performance are often hard to distinguish. This study combines game-theoretic models with empirical evidence from a "natural experiment" of policy reform. The introduction in the United Kingdom of the 1956 Restrictive Trade Practices Act led to the registration and subsequent abolition of explicit restrictive agreements between firms and the intensification of price competition across a range of manufacturing industries. An equally large number of industries were not affected by the legislation. Using data from before and after the 1956 act, this book compares the two groups of industries to determine the effect of price competition on concentration, firm and plant numbers, profitability, advertising intensity, and innovation. The book avoids two problems common to empirical studies of competition: how to measure the intensity of competition and how to unravel the links between competition and other variables. Because the change in the intensity of competition had an external cause, there is no need to measure the intensity of competition directly, and it is possible to identify one-way causal effects when estimating the impact of competition. The book also examines issues such as the industries in which collusion is more likely to occur; the effect of cartels and cartel laws on market structure and profitability; the links between competition, advertising, and innovation; and the constraints on the exercise of merger and antitrust policies.

Research in Accounting in Emerging Economies

Research in Accounting in Emerging Economies
Author: Shahzad Uddin
Publisher: Emerald Group Publishing
Total Pages: 310
Release: 2010-12-02
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0857244523

Includes research papers that examines various issues including the adoption of International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) and International Public Sector Accounting Standards (IPSASs), management accounting change in the context of public sector reforms, corporate reporting disclosures, auditing, etcetera.

Earnings Management

Earnings Management
Author: Joshua Ronen
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Total Pages: 587
Release: 2008-08-06
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0387257713

This book is a study of earnings management, aimed at scholars and professionals in accounting, finance, economics, and law. The authors address research questions including: Why are earnings so important that firms feel compelled to manipulate them? What set of circumstances will induce earnings management? How will the interaction among management, boards of directors, investors, employees, suppliers, customers and regulators affect earnings management? How to design empirical research addressing earnings management? What are the limitations and strengths of current empirical models?

Corporate Payout Policy

Corporate Payout Policy
Author: Harry DeAngelo
Publisher: Now Publishers Inc
Total Pages: 215
Release: 2009
Genre: Corporations
ISBN: 1601982046

Corporate Payout Policy synthesizes the academic research on payout policy and explains "how much, when, and how". That is (i) the overall value of payouts over the life of the enterprise, (ii) the time profile of a firm's payouts across periods, and (iii) the form of those payouts. The authors conclude that today's theory does a good job of explaining the general features of corporate payout policies, but some important gaps remain. So while our emphasis is to clarify "what we know" about payout policy, the authors also identify a number of interesting unresolved questions for future research. Corporate Payout Policy discusses potential influences on corporate payout policy including managerial use of payouts to signal future earnings to outside investors, individuals' behavioral biases that lead to sentiment-based demands for distributions, the desire of large block stockholders to maintain corporate control, and personal tax incentives to defer payouts. The authors highlight four important "carry-away" points: the literature's focus on whether repurchases will (or should) drive out dividends is misplaced because it implicitly assumes that a single payout vehicle is optimal; extant empirical evidence is strongly incompatible with the notion that the primary purpose of dividends is to signal managers' views of future earnings to outside investors; over-confidence on the part of managers is potentially a first-order determinant of payout policy because it induces them to over-retain resources to invest in dubious projects and so behavioral biases may, in fact, turn out to be more important than agency costs in explaining why investors pressure firms to accelerate payouts; the influence of controlling stockholders on payout policy --- particularly in non-U.S. firms, where controlling stockholders are common --- is a promising area for future research. Corporate Payout Policy is required reading for both researchers and practitioners interested in understanding this central topic in corporate finance and governance.

Boards at Work : How Directors View their Roles and Responsibilities

Boards at Work : How Directors View their Roles and Responsibilities
Author: Philip Stiles
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Total Pages: 182
Release: 2001-03-29
Genre:
ISBN: 0191580937

Boards of directors are coming under increasing scrutiny in terms of their contribution in monitoring and controlling management, particularly in the wake of high-profile corporate frauds and failures, and also their potential to add value to organizational performance through involvement in the strategy process and through building relationships with key investors. Despite the importance of these issues, not only to organizations but also arguably to national competitiveness, the nature of board activity remains largely a black box, clouded by prescriptions, prejudices, and half-truths. This book responds to calls for greater scrutiny of boards of directors with an in-depth examination of directors of UK organizations, drawing on the accounts of directors themselves as to their roles, influence, and the potential and limits to their power. Much work on boards of directors has labelled the board as a rubber stamp for dominant management, and non-executive directors in particular have been variously described as poodles, pet rocks, or parsley on the fish. Such accounts are rooted in assumptions of board activity that are essentially adversarial in nature, and that the solution to the 'problem' of reconciling the interests of managers with those of shareholders is to increase the checks and balances available to the board of directors. The findings of this study show that boards, in many cases, are far more than passive rubber stamps for management and that non-executives are encouraged to act as trusted advisers to the executives and the chief executive, rather than solely monitors of executive activity. Boards are important mechanisms in maintaining the strategic framework of the organization through setting the boundaries of organizational activity. The potential of the board members, in particular the non-executives, to fulfil such a mandate depends on a number of factors, including ability, willingness to engage with the organizational issues, and the degree of knowledge they have relevant to the host firm. Above all, the degree of trust built between members of the board, and between the board and key external constituencies, is at the heart of effective board behaviour.

Introduction to Earnings Management

Introduction to Earnings Management
Author: Malek El Diri
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 120
Release: 2017-08-20
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 3319626868

This book provides researchers and scholars with a comprehensive and up-to-date analysis of earnings management theory and literature. While it raises new questions for future research, the book can be also helpful to other parties who rely on financial reporting in making decisions like regulators, policy makers, shareholders, investors, and gatekeepers e.g., auditors and analysts. The book summarizes the existing literature and provides insight into new areas of research such as the differences between earnings management, fraud, earnings quality, impression management, and expectation management; the trade-off between earnings management activities; the special measures of earnings management; and the classification of earnings management motives based on a comprehensive theoretical framework.

Earnings Quality

Earnings Quality
Author: Jennifer Francis
Publisher: Now Publishers Inc
Total Pages: 97
Release: 2008
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1601981147

This review lays out a research perspective on earnings quality. We provide an overview of alternative definitions and measures of earnings quality and a discussion of research design choices encountered in earnings quality research. Throughout, we focus on a capital markets setting, as opposed, for example, to a contracting or stewardship setting. Our reason for this choice stems from the view that the capital market uses of accounting information are fundamental, in the sense of providing a basis for other uses, such as stewardship. Because resource allocations are ex ante decisions while contracting/stewardship assessments are ex post evaluations of outcomes, evidence on whether, how and to what degree earnings quality influences capital market resource allocation decisions is fundamental to understanding why and how accounting matters to investors and others, including those charged with stewardship responsibilities. Demonstrating a link between earnings quality and, for example, the costs of equity and debt capital implies a basic economic role in capital allocation decisions for accounting information; this role has only recently been documented in the accounting literature. We focus on how the precision of financial information in capturing one or more underlying valuation-relevant constructs affects the assessment and use of that information by capital market participants. We emphasize that the choice of constructs to be measured is typically contextual. Our main focus is on the precision of earnings, which we view as a summary indicator of the overall quality of financial reporting. Our intent in discussing research that evaluates the capital market effects of earnings quality is both to stimulate further research in this area and to encourage research on related topics, including, for example, the role of earnings quality in contracting and stewardship.

Ethnostatistics

Ethnostatistics
Author: Robert P. Gephart
Publisher:
Total Pages:
Release: 2020
Genre: Anthropology
ISBN: 9781529745160

Ethnostatistics is concerned with understanding how statistics are actually constructed and used by social scientists and professionals. While the conventional field of statistics emphasizes formal rules and rational methods for creating reliable and valid counts and measures of social phenomena, ethnostatistics addresses how interpretive work and informal practices that are needed to produce statistics interact with formal, technical knowledge to shape statistical outcomes. The goal is to develop a social theory of measurement that explains the construction, use, and meaning of statistics in scientific and professional life. Ethnostatistics thus provides important insights into essential but neglected features of statistics production and use. It addresses how practical knowledge, informal practices, and research settings influence the construction of statistics; it provides new tools to help researchers determine the appropriateness of the assumptions made in using statistics; and it reveals how quantitative research uses literary practices to present and interpret numbers for rhetorical purposes. Three levels of ethnostatistics are explored. Level 1, producing statistics, uses ethnographies to describe how qualitative observations are undertaken and transformed into numerals and measures. Level 2, statistics at work, uses computer simulations to assess implicit assumptions and informal practices in measurement. Level 3, the rhetoric of statistics, explores how statistics are used for persuasive purposes in scientific texts. These levels are illustrated with examples from economics, psychology, sociology, social studies of science, management research, and organization theory. Ethnostatistics is extended into other domains including qualimetrics, methodological myths and urban legends, and bibliometric assessments of academic performance.

Concentrated Corporate Ownership

Concentrated Corporate Ownership
Author: Randall K. Morck
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 404
Release: 2007-12-01
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0226536823

Standard economic models assume that many small investors own firms. This is so in most large U.S. firms, but wealthy individuals or families generally hold controlling blocks in smaller U.S. firms and in all firms in most other countries. Given this, the lack of theoretical and empirical work on tightly held firms is surprising. What corporate governance problems arise in tightly held firms? How do these differ from corporate governance problems in widely held firms? How do control blocks arise and how are they maintained? How does concentrated ownership affect economic growth? How should we regulate tightly held firms? Drawing together leading scholars from law, economics, and finance, this volume examines the economic and legal issues of concentrated ownership and their impact on a shifting global economy.