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This paper aims to study the audit committee (AC) provisions of the Sarbanes‐Oxley Act with the objective of identifying implementation issues and to recommend firm and board actions to remedy the problems that are identified.

Standard economic theory was used to analyze the incentives and abilities of AC members, relying on results in the financial economics literature regarding outside director behavior.

The framework predicts that the new provisions in conjunction with the new regulatory/liability environment will increase risk‐aversion in directors belonging to ACs. This, in turn, creates an incentive alignment problem between AC members and shareholders leading to sub‐optimal decisions with regard to the audit. In particular, it is noted that demand will increase for high‐quality audits irrespective of cost considerations. The analysis also indicates that director labor markets will not mitigate this sub‐optimality.

Because Sarbanes‐Oxley places direct responsibility for the audit in the hands of the AC, interventions by managers who may have incentives more aligned with those of shareholders are not considered. In a real world setting, managers may be playing a constructive role behind the scenes.

Specific action items to mitigate the problems are suggested. These steps have the combined effect of: increasing compensation for AC members (to support the additional workload); decreasing their risk exposure (to facilitate incentive alignment); and providing additional resources (to ensure efficiency of oversight).

In studying the AC provisions of the Sarbanes‐Oxley Act, this paper has gone someway towards identifying implementation issues and recommending firm and board actions to remedy the identified problems.

This paper aims to examine the research questions: Do executive and non‐executive directors face similar labor market penalties upon revelation of accounting fraud? Are all executive directors treated by markets as a homogenous group? Or, do executive directors who are top managers face stiffer penalties than other executive directors?

Board membership of incumbent directors in US firms accused of accounting fraud are tracked for three years after the revelation. Two labor market consequences/penalties are considered. Probability of losing internal, own firm board seat is the likelihood that incumbent directors leave the accused firm's board upon accounting fraud revelation. The likelihood of losing at least one external board seat (outside directorship) is also examined. Both univariate tests and multivariate LOGIT regressions are used to conduct the analysis.

Compared to non‐executive directors, executive directors are more than twice as likely to lose own firm board seat and at least five times as likely to lose at least one outside directorship. Moreover, all executives, top or otherwise, appear to face similar tough penalties.

Accounting fraud is a rare event; this may limit the generality of the findings. Results obtained from a US sample may be applicable to countries with well‐developed capital and labor markets. Results imply that the labor market for directors serves a vital function in the US‐style corporate governance environment; labor market discipline provides at least some incentives for board members, including non‐employee directors and other executive directors, to perform their fiduciary duties.

This is the first study that utilizes a single corporate event to analyze the operation of the labor market across different categories of directors. Also, while studies have examined penalties on top executives there is no evidence that other executives who also serve on the board of the accused firms suffer labor market penalties.

Today, most firms provide equity‐based incentive compensation to their non‐executive directors. We summarize viewpoints supportive and critical of this development. We argue that the effectiveness of incentive compensation is related to the structure of the incentive pay contact. We discuss the use of options and shares as well as the issue of whether incentive pay should be geared towards current rewards or future incentives. We also discuss the critical issue of maintaining the ownership exposure of directors by providing sufficient levels of equity as well as placing restrictions on cashing out. Using our arguments above, we suggest guidelines for constructing an optimal contract. We compare 289 incentive plans offered by public companies in the USA during 1988‐1998 and find that plans deviate significantly from the optimum.

The specific purpose of this study is to understand how firm size and public/private affiliation (employment status) affect voluntary disclosure decisions concerning quantitatively immaterial nonfinancial information. Although the prior disclosure literature is large and has considered a variety of factors including size and to a lesser degree employment status, this study offers a new perspective by considering both factors in the context of qualitative materiality.

This paper presents 136 manager participants with 24 cues representing nonfinancial, realistic business events and solicits their disclosure judgments. The cues are adapted from Pinsker et al. and contain information that does not meet widely-accepted quantitative thresholds for disclosure (e.g. 5 percent of net income), yet were identified by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) as more likely to be material. This paper uses a median split of total assets and total revenues to determine “large” and “small” firms. Managers' judgments are measured in an own-firm setting (The context is their current employer, which can be public or private.).

This paper finds that disclosure is positively linked to firm size, but this paper do not find an employer status effect. Additional testing reveals that private firm managers are sensitive to SEC oversight and other external, competitive pressures, suggesting that they face mimetic pressures to behave like their public firm counterparts. In sum, their findings contribute significantly to the disclosure, strategic management, institutional theory and judgment-and-decision-making (JDM) literatures.

Although there is a vast literature on public firm managers' voluntary disclosure behavior (mostly involving large firms), there is little research regarding the voluntary disclosure behavior of small or large private firm managers involving nonfinancial information.

The fact that stocks going ex‐dividend decline in price by less than the dividend amount is theoretically attributed to the differential taxation of dividend and capital gains or the differential taxation of investor groups. NYSE, Amex and Toronto Stock Exchange listed stocks, and stocks interlisted on these three exchanges, are examined to infer the tax jurisdiction of the marginal investor. The stock price changes relative to the dividends are consistent with a tax clientele effect. Further, the stock price changes are plausible given the tax rates. Ex‐dividend day behavior is different for non‐interlisted stocks on all three exchanges, suggesting each exchange has a different tax clientele. Canadian firms interlisted on US exchanges exhibit ex‐dividend day behavior consistent with the appropriate US exchange’s non‐interlisted stocks, suggesting that the marginal investors in these stocks are American.

This paper uses a multifactor logit model to analyze the aftermarket performance of randomly chosen IPO's in hot and cold markets. The theories of risk aversion and utility maximization, in conjunction with the paper's empirical results, suggest that cold market investors are more risk averse than are hot market investors.

Over the next few months a lively image of Dick Whittington and his cat will be making its appearance in the capital. Walking briskly along, with his cat trotting obediently behind or dashing ahead with its tail in the air, he will stride across the print and posters of the Museum of London as the Museum's new corporate image.

Price fairness is important amongst construction and engineering consultants because a perceived lack of it engenders unwillingness to pay amongst clients. This can create contractual disputes that negatively impact upon a consultant’s ability to generate sufficient revenue to ensure business continuity and survival. With this in mind, this research aims to analyse the pricing measurement forces needed to attain pricing fairness within a Ghanaian construction cost consultancy practice. Specific objectives are to identify the key variables responsible for price fairness within cost consultant services and to establish any interrelationships between them.

This study leans towards the positivist methodological tradition by adopting a quantitative approach. A survey questionnaire was distributed to a random sample of 79 construction cost consultancies, drawn from a population of 372, who were registered with the Ghana Institution of Surveyors. Hypotheses developed from the literature review were then tested on data collected.

The analysis revealed that fairness of construction cost consultancy services pricing is significantly related to value and affordability, pricing objectives, pricing strategies, taxes and international trade and its effects on inputs for construction cost consultancy services.

The paper advances knowledge by providing a basis for the consideration of pricing forces in the valuing of construction cost consultancy services which hitherto has not been the case.

The purpose of this article is to present an overview of the history and development of transaction log analysis (TLA) in library and information science research. Organizing a literature review of the first twenty‐five years of TLA poses some challenges and requires some decisions. The primary organizing principle could be a strict chronology of the published research, the research questions addressed, the automated information retrieval (IR) systems that generated the data, the results gained, or even the researchers themselves. The group of active transaction log analyzers remains fairly small in number, and researchers who use transaction logs tend to use this method more than once, so tracing the development and refinement of individuals' uses of the methodology could provide insight into the progress of the method as a whole. For example, if we examine how researchers like W. David Penniman, John Tolle, Christine Borgman, Ray Larson, and Micheline Hancock‐Beaulieu have modified their own understandings and applications of the method over time, we may get an accurate sense of the development of all applications.