Purpose: The survival rate of newly listed firms is low, and there is evidence of a surge of poorly performing new listed firms leading up to the crash of the dot.com bubble. The author investigates this phenomenon and analyzes investors' ability to understand the quality of accounting...

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to reexamine the corporate focus hypothesis to establish the characteristics of firms that discontinue operations. The authors concentrate on four interrelated elements of the hypothesis, diversification, performance, financial constraint and market-based...