ABSTRACT This research examines three strategies that a multi-product firm can adopt when facing a single-product entrant under Bertrand competition: (i) staying in the duopoly market, (ii) abandoning the duopoly market, and (iii) bundling the two goods. When the competing good is homogenous, bundling is the most profitable strategy if the product differentiation of the two goods produced by the multi-product

ABSTRACT Although researchers have paid increasing attention to how corporate governance influences firm performance, there has been limited focus on how the internal audit function impacts firm performance. This study thus examines how the implementation of internal audit recommendations (IIAR) impacts firm performance and whether audit committee characteristics increase or decrease this impact. By

ABSTRACT Chief executive officers (CEOs) could use tax avoidance to reduce costs and hence increase firm profits. Nevertheless, the reputation of the firm could be harmed. Prior studies find that firms’ tax avoidance is associated with CEOs’ personality traits. We attempt to predict firms’ engagement in tax avoidance using CEOs’ flying hobby measured by the pilot certificate. Using various advanced

ABSTRACT This study examines how the board of directors (BOD) of Islamic banks (IBs) might affect earnings management differently, compared to BOD of conventional banks (CBs). Our results indicate that banks in the MENA region that promote BOD independence incur less earnings management. Distinguishing between CBs and IBs, we document higher loan quality and credit policy at IBs. Moreover, smaller

ABSTRACT This study analyzes the effect of bank CEO appointment structure and tenure on borrowers’ accounting practices and earnings management. Drawing on agency theory, we posit that agency costs are high for banks that frequently change CEOs and those that appoint CEOs from external sources. The results indicate firms that borrow from banks with high agency costs adopt less conservative accounting

ABSTRACT With a difference-in-differences approach, we find that world-wide reforms result in higher audit fees for reform firms. And this is specially so for reforms involving components of director independence and/or audit committee and auditor independence, adopting the rule-based approach, and implemented in countries with weaker institutional quality. Further analysis reveals that the increase

ABSTRACT In this study, we examine whether the stock market pricing of the funding status of pension plans has improved after the adoption of SFAS 158. We find that the overvaluation of firms with severely underfunded pension plans, as documented in the prior literature, is no longer observed in the years after the adoption of SFAS 158. In addition, we find that the positive effect of SFAS 158 adoption

ABSTRACT Several studies provide evidence that auditors play an important role in the implementation of accounting comparability. We extend this line of research by examining whether comparability in accounting earnings between two firms is affected by auditor industry expertise measured at the partner level. Using 45,741 pairs of firms over the period 2003–2016, we find that the accounting comparability

ABSTRACT This study examines whether auditor switching for opinion shopping (OS) influences investors’ perceptions of audit quality (proxied by earnings response coefficients; ERCs). To the extent that audit quality deteriorates after firms switch auditors for OS, investors are less likely to rely on these firms’ audited earnings. This may result in a negative association between auditor switching

ABSTRACT Opportunistic overspending tendencies induce inflexible cost adjustments and encourage bad cost stickiness. To examine whether this perspective applies to public sector organizations (PSOs) and mergers, we test the asymmetric cost behaviors, (1) free riding and (2) empire building, associated with managerial incentives in merged Japanese municipal enterprises. Consequently, we find evidence

ABSTRACT In this study, we examine the impact of labor union power on stock price synchronicity. We proxy labor union power by the collective relation law index and measure stock price synchronicity by the level of co-movement between a firm’s stock price and market index. Using a sample of 37 countries between 1995 and 2016, we find that labor union power is positively associated with stock price

ABSTRACT Using a novel debt enforcement index reflecting legal and economic characteristics directly relating to resolving insolvency across the world, we document that bank loan terms are more stringent (larger interest rate spread, higher collateral requirement, more covenants) in countries with weaker debt enforcement. The effect is more prominent when creditor rights are better protected and debtors

ABSTRACT This study investigates the impact of the inevitable disclosure doctrine (IDD) on risk-taking incentives of chief executive officers (CEOs). Because the IDD restricts CEOs’ external employment opportunities, we expect CEOs to become more risk-averse and firms to increase CEO risk-taking incentives after IDD adoption. Consistent with expectations, we find that IDD adoption is associated with

ABSTRACT This paper investigates the effectiveness of monetary policy instruments under dollarization in association with economic growth and inflation using 30 countries from 2000 to 2016. The estimation results indicate that first, the monetary aggregates, M2, are more relevant policy instruments while the interest rates including policy rates exhibit overall limited effectiveness under dollarization

ABSTRACT This paper examines whether distracted shareholders reduce firms’ value of cash holdings. Following prior literature, we construct a firm-year level shareholder ‘distraction’ measure, by exploiting exogenous shocks to institutional shareholders’ portfolios. We find that firms with distracted shareholders experience a decrease in the marginal value of cash holdings, which indicates that firms

ABSTRACT This study finds differential performance impacts of outsider and insider interim CEO successions. Stock markets react incrementally positively to interim CEO successions when the interim CEOs are from outside rather than inside firms. Relative to insider interim CEOs, outsider interim CEOs produce worse earnings performance and greater restructuring charges during their services but lead

ABSTRACT Recent anecdotes suggest that shareholdings of for-profit firms by nonprofit organizations engender agency conflicts between donors and managers. Analyzing a unique dataset of nonprofits in Korea, we find evidence that donors of the share-affiliated nonprofits rely less on the program ratio, a primary accounting performance metric in nonprofits, in making subsequent donations than those in

ABSTRACT In this paper, we examine whether requirements to disclose audited financial statements enhance financial reporting quality of privately held firms. Unlike U.S. private firms, private corporations in Korea are required to prepare and disclose audited financial statements. While limited companies, another type of Korean private firms, are almost identical to private corporations in economic

ABSTRACT Corporate credit ratings (CRs) are closely related to companies’ cost of debt financing. Recent research has drawn wide attention to how nonfinancial as well as financial factors may affect ratings. By manually collecting information about the profiles of chief financial officers (CFOs) of US companies, we examine the effect of CFOs’ accounting expertise on corporate CRs. The results show

ABSTRACT The purpose of our study is to explore the relationship among managerial overconfidence, CSR and firm value. Nonlinear regression and OLS regression are used to test the hypotheses. Managerial overconfidence is measured by the integrated index. The financial data of Korean-listed companies are collected from the DataGuide5 database. The ESG rating of Koran Governance Service (KCGS) is selected

ABSTRACT We critically examine two important methodological issues related to the estimation of discretionary accruals: the Jones models and the industry approach, both of which are considered the norms in the earnings management studies. We document that the original Jones models are the regression-through-the-origin (RTO) models. The RTO Jones models unduly overstate the significance of PPE and R2

ABSTRACT We find that acquiring firm’s accounting conservatism positively affects the likelihood of targets fulfilling their performance commitments in valuation adjustment mechanism (VAM) contracts in merger and acquisition (M&A) deals. The effect is more pronounced when the acquirer is in a high-competition industry and audited by non-Top eight accounting firms and the deal is cross-region. Further

ABSTRACT In this study, we examine the impact of a change in the bonus-based incentives on firm performance and promotions. We use both a proprietary dataset and a field-based survey of a leading bakery chain in Japan that changed its bonus determination from focusing on nonfinancial measures to financial measures. We find that firm performance declines under the new bonus plan due to a misalignment

ABSTRACT In this study, the relationship between exchange rate uncertainty and Turkey’s foreign trade performance is analyzed using monthly data from 2002:01 to 2017:12 via Structural VAR (SVAR) model. The empirical results indicate that domestic income and import have more impact on Turkey’s export. Moreover, domestic income, exchange rate and exchange rate uncertainty are effective on Turkey’s import

ABSTRACT Based on the quarterly data of listed companies on the ‘hudongyi’ Internet platform of the Shenzhen Stock Exchange from 2011 to 2018, this study uses the economic policy uncertainty (EPU) index to explore the impact of EPU on voluntary disclosure. We find that EPU is positively correlated with the timeliness and sufficiency of voluntary disclosure. Moreover, investor sentiment plays a mediation

ABSTRACT This paper established ageneral equilibrium model to study the effects of the changes of remittance rate in the migrant workers’ income on environmental pollution. We found that, in the capital specific case, the increase of urban-rural migrants’ remittance rate will increase the total remittance of the migrant workers, increase the demand of agricultural sector for agricultural producer services

ABSTRACT This paper constructs a three-stage model of corporate turnaround, beginning with political connections’ affects declining companies’ implementation of turnaround strategies. The model also explores political connections’ role in corporate turnaround in the context of the most recent global financial crisis. This study discovered that political connections exhibited a weaker ability to allocate

ABSTRACT This study examines whether the use of non-financial performance measures (NFPMs) in chief executive officer (CEO) compensation contracts is related to stock price crash risk. The literature on NFPMs suggests that incorporating NFPMs into executive compensation contracts motivates managers to engage less in short-term oriented behaviors such as earnings management, while the literature on

ABSTRACT This study investigates the impact of bank competition and regulation on bank efficiency in the Asia-Pacific region during 2001–2016. The result reveals that market power is positively related to bank efficiency. We also find that stringent activity restrictions, strong official supervisory power, and low capital requirements are associated with high bank efficiency. Furthermore, market power

ABSTRACT Recent studies advocate two new benchmark models (the Fama-French five-factor model and the Hou, Xue and Zhang four-factor model) with monthly data. Our daily data approach provides considerable supplement to the monthly data approach presented in recent studies. We adopt the advanced bootstrap methodology by replicating the original data sample, and this approach should effectively alleviate

ABSTRACT We investigate the determinants of analyst reputation considering the impact of limited attention. We find support for the hypothesis that capital market participants have limited attention and assess analyst reputation based on their large-firm forecast performance, not their performance as a whole. We find no relation between an analyst’s overall forecast accuracy and initially obtaining

ABSTRACT This paper examines the asset pricing implications of labor market friction by exploiting the staggered recognition of the Inevitable Disclosure Doctrine (IDD) by U.S. state courts as an exogenous event that adversely impacts employee mobility. After the recognition of the doctrine in their state, firms exhibit a significant increase in stock price crash risk compared to comparable firms in