In the Chinese securities market, with its characteristics of influence through personal relationships (Guanxi) and underdeveloped standards of law and enforcement, can independent directors play the supervisory role expected by securities regulators? In this study we use the degree of precision...

The variability of accounting accruals provides a measure of the normal level of managers' accounting discretion and has important implications for event studies of earnings management. We examine how this measure is related to the economic factors including both firm characteristics and...

In the UK, SSAP 13 requires that firms immediately expense most of their R&D expenditures.The reported earnings of high-R&D expenditure firms are therefore likely to convey less valuerelevantinformation to investors than those of less research-intensive firms. Using a sample offirms from the...

Since the introduction of modern portfolio theory by Roy (1952), Markowitz (1952) and Sharpe (1964) about half a century ago, the allocation of investment weights among various assets in a portfolio is one of the most important areas of research in finance. However, we are not aware of any study...

Polynomial goal programming, in which investor preferences for skewness can be incorporated, is utilized to determine the optimal portfolio from Latin American, US and European capital markets.The empirical findings suggest that the incorporation of skewness into an investors portfolio decision...

Based on several research studies and in particular the theoretical study of Prakash, de Boyrie, Hamid and Smyser (1997), it is known that the variance as well as the skewness of the probability distribution of rates of return increases if the investors' investment interval increases. In the...

In the UK, SSAP 13 requires that firms immediately expense most of their Ramp;D expenditures. The reported earnings of high-Ramp;D expenditure firms are therefore likely to convey less value-relevant information to investors than those of less research-intensive firms. Using a sample of firms...

In the Chinese securities market, with its characteristics of influence through personal relationships (Guanxi) and underdeveloped standards of law and enforcement, can independent directors play the supervisory role expected by securities regulators? In this study we use the degree of precision...

Earnings management is a key issue for financial reporting. The purpose of this paper is to derive a set of indices to measure the pervasiveness of earnings management (PEM) using the properties of quarterly accrual volatility. The PEM index can be viewed as a quality measure of financial...

The earnings-returns relation asymmetry indicates the changing relation between earnings and returns when the nature of earnings information differs in a certain way. Literature has documented a variety of asymmetric relations and provided a wide range of explanations. Hayn (1995) accounted for...