Prior research in the Australian equity market has failed to fully document the well-known influences of size and book-to-market effects that have been evidenced in other markets. While much is known about the size effect in Australia, data limitations have curtailed attempts to analyse the...

There is substantial argument that political risk is an important and increasing influence on international portfolio allocation decisions. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the relation between political risk and stock returns within the context of emerging markets. The issue is...

Emerging stock markets have been identified as being at least partially segmented from global capital markets. As a consequence, it has been argued that local risk factors rather than world risk factors are the primary source of equity return variation in these markets. This paper seeks to...

We study product market competition’s influence on annual report readability. As competition increases in an industry, our findings show that firms reduce the readability of their annual reports. We further document that the impact of competition on annual report readability is stronger for...

We find that the acquisition of private information is associated with an improvement in market liquidity. An empirical analysis of search activity through EDGAR as a proxy for information acquisition provides evidence for a theoretical gap in market microstructure models. We also find EDGAR...

The agency relationship between managers and shareholders has the potential to influence decision-making in the firm which in turn potentially impacts on firm characteristics such as value and leverage. Prior evidence has demonstrated an association between ownership structure and firm value....

Agency theory embeds the influential relationship that exist between managers and shareholders of firms. This relationship has the potential to influence decision-making in the firm which in turn has potential impacts on firm characteristics such as firm value. Prior evidence has demonstrated an...

Theoretically, it is often argued that the international diversification of earnings should enable multinational corporations to sustain higher levels of debt than domestic corporations. Studies using US multinationals often report lower leverage for multinationals relative to domestic...

This paper represents one of the first studies to document the empirical relation between capital structure and management confidence. In a unique sample of US firms that have existed for over 25 years we find management confidence, as proxied by University of Michigan Consumer Sentiment Index,...