Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to investigate and compare the weak-form efficiency of a set of 24 African continent-wide stock price indices and those of eight individual African national stock price indices. Design/methodology/approach – Variance-ratio tests based on ranks and...

Central bank independence is widely thought be a sine qua non of a credible commitment to price stability. The surprise decision by the UK government to grant operational independence to the Bank of England in 1997 affords us a natural experiment with which to gauge the impact on the yield curve...

While numerous empirical studies include proxies for growth opportunities in their analyses, there is limited evidence as to the validity of the various growth proxies used. Based on a sample of 1942 firm-years for listed UK companies over the 1990-2004 period, we assess the performance of eight...

We use the British real estate and investment fund industries as experimental settings where historic cost (HC) and fair value accounting (FVA) can be compared. Both industries have the majority of their assets marked to market and hence the difference between the two accounting systems is...

Prior research on capital structure by Rajan and Zingales (1995) suggests that the level of gearing in UK companies is positively related to size and tangibility, and negatively correlated with profitability and the level of growth opportunities. However, as argued by Harris and Raviv (1991),...

This paper examines the stock market reaction to 402 company investment announcements made by UK companies during the 1991-1996 period. The market-adjusted abnormal returns are generally positive but small. Investment announcements are classified according to functional categories, and we find...

We extend the recent literature concerning accounting based valuation models to investigate financial firms from six European countries with substantial financial sectors: France, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Switzerland and the UK. Not only are these crucial industries worthy of study in their...

Although the impact of growth opportunities on company value has been recognized since Miller and Modigliani (1961), relatively little empirical work has been undertaken to value growth opportunities. In this study the validity of the KBM model (Kester (1984) and Brealey and Myers (1981)) is...

In this paper the gains and losses to shareholders of 71 foreign companies which made takeover bids for companies listed in the United Kingdom during the 1986-1991 period are analysed. The average abnormal return during the month of the bid announcement was positive, although not statistically...

This paper assesses the impact of the publication of FRS No. 12, 'Provisions, Contingent Liabilities and Contingent Assets' in 1998 on the share prices of UK companies. Although the standard affects all UK companies (restricting "big bath" provisions), it specifically requires extractive firms...