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This study aims to examine the impact of board female participation on Australian firms’ innovation.

Data are from the 500 largest Australian Securities Exchange (ASX)-listed companies for 2004–2015. Measures of innovation concern input (research and development expenditure and intangible assets) and output (patents registered) indicators.

A positive and significant association exists between female director participation and firm innovation activity. This association exists across industry classifications independent of technological importance and is particularly driven by materials and health-care sectors. Findings support calls for more board diversity in line with board female membership positively influencing innovative investment and development activities.

The economic efficacy of the latest revisions to the ASX Corporate Governance Council principles and recommendations (“ASX CGC revisions”) is supported. Diverse boards are a strong source of innovation. Regulators and corporations can use the findings to establish principles and practices that promote female board diversity.

This study is the first to examine the link between board diversity and corporate innovation in Australia where there is under-representation of women on corporate boards and in key management positions. Also lacking are formal legislative or governance policy mandates on board gender diversity. Beyond confirming a positive association between board diversity and levels of corporate innovation, this paper provides new findings that this relationship is driven by women who are non-executive (independent) directors, independent of the underlying technology intensity of firms and moderated by the nature of firm-level profitability and growth opportunities.

The purpose of this paper is to identify means of better associating executive remuneration with managerial decision making and firm performance.

The authors evaluate the influence of conditional accounting conservatism on CEO compensation. The authors focus particularly on the ex ante pay-for-performance sensitivity (PPS) of CEO stock option grants. The empirical method used is panel data regression.

The authors find that accounting conservatism is positively related to the PPS of CEO option-based compensation. The effects of accounting conservatism on the PPS of options are more significant for firms with relatively weaker corporate governance and for the period before the introduction of FAS 123R. The findings suggest that directors reward CEOs for adopting accounting conservatism, both in general terms and incrementally, and that rewards are channelled through incentive-linked compensation. The results are also consistent with the view that accounting conservatism compliments other mechanisms, such as corporate governance, in reducing information asymmetry and agency problems between managers and shareholders and other stakeholders.

This paper provides a number of important contributions to the literature. It is the first to identify a relationship between accounting conservatism and option-based CEO compensation, which has important potential contracting and enforcement implications due to the incomplete nature of option contracts and the reward and risk attributes of CEOs. This paper is also the first to analyse the association between conditional accounting conservatism and CEO compensation at the firm–year level, by employing the firm–year conservatism score approach proposed by Khan and Watts (2009). This provides for greater insight regarding the interaction between accounting conservatism and other firm-specific elements than is otherwise obtainable from an overall firm or year interpretations derived from the traditional Basu (1997) asymmetric timeliness model approach. Furthermore, this paper also provides a comparison of the relative association of accounting conservatism on both explicit and implicit forms of CEO compensation for the same firm sample. This allows for the assessment of whether accounting conservatism relates differently to incentive-based CEO remuneration relative to ex post CEO compensation outcomes.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the effects of cross-country characteristics on acquirers' target status choice in cross-border mergers and acquisitions across 41 emerging markets.

The paper first reviews the existing literature and develops the related hypotheses, in conjunction with the objectives of this paper. We then describe the data employed, variable measurement and examine the effects of cross-country characteristics on the acquirers' target status choice in cross-border mergers and acquisitions while controlling for firm-level and deal-specific characteristics. The paper continues to conduct the robustness check on cross-country determinants of target status choices using the difference independent variables rather than target country-level variables only.

This research found that the likelihood of a public firm acquired relative to private one is higher if the target firm is located in countries with stronger government quality, weaker economic freedom, better financial market development and lower cultural distance between the host and home countries. The results suggest that bidders actively assess cross-country characteristics as part of their acquisition planning.

Rather than commonly analysed determinants in the previous research such as firm- and deal-specific attributes, value creation and shareholder protection, this paper indicates that institutional environments and economic conditions are closely associated with acquisition risks and benefits and have direct influences on bidder firms' acquisition bidding planning and target choice decision-making.

We evaluate the performance of fixed income mutual funds using stochastic discount factors motivated by continuous-time term structure models. Time-aggregation of these models for discrete returns generates new empirical “factors,” and these factors contribute significant explanatory power to the models. We provide a conditional performance evaluation for US fixed income mutual funds, conditioning on a variety of discrete ex-ante characterizations of the states of the economy. During 1985–1999 we find that fixed income funds return less on average than passive benchmarks that do not pay expenses, but not in all economic states. Fixed income funds typically do poorly when short-term interest rates or industrial capacity utilization rates are high, and offer higher returns when quality-related credit spreads are high. We find more heterogeneity across fund styles than across characteristics-based fund groups. Mortgage funds underperform a GNMA index in all economic states. These excess returns are reduced, and typically become insignificant, when we adjust for risk using the models.

Purpose – The purpose of this study is to empirically examine the extent of adoption of International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) within three major South Asian countries – India, Pakistan and Bangladesh.

Design/methodology/approach – We selected 566 non-financial listed companies for the financial year 1997–1998. Fifty-two measurement practices and 72 disclosure practices were drawn from 15 commonly adopted IFRS.

Findings – We find that the overall level of adoption of IFRS regarding measurement and disclosure practices is higher in Pakistan compared with India and Bangladesh. We also find that the adoption level is high for inventories, income statement for the period, research and development costs, retirement benefit costs, foreign currency translations, business combination and accounting for investment in associates, whereas the adoption level is low in the areas of cash flow statements, taxes on income, property, plant and equipment, accounting for leases, accounting for government grants, borrowing costs and consolidated financial statements.

Originality/value – Adoption of IFRS issued by the International Accounting Standards Board (IASB) by listed companies has been a subject of immense interest among accounting standard setters, practitioners and academics throughout the world. South Asian countries have adopted IFRS, either fully or with minor modifications, with a view to improving the quality of financial reporting. This article is one of few that examines this important issue and concludes with some suggestions for improving the adoption levels within South Asia.

This article reports the findings of an evaluation of a project that targeted prolific offenders where 101 adult prolific offenders were subject to a regime of intense supervision by probation officers and police officers. The target for the reduction in offending frequency was exceeded. The article also outlines the practice issues that arose during the project.

This paper aims to examine whether the level of harmonization of accounting measurement practices in three South Asian countries – Bangladesh, India and Pakistan – has improved since 1998 as a result of the changes, in recent years, globally in accounting measurement practices due to the substantial efforts of the International Accounting Standards Board (IASB). South Asian countries have taken a number of steps and made changes in accounting regulations to support the IASB’s harmonization programme.

In all, 370 non-financial companies for the financial years 1997-1998 and 2007-2008 were used, and consistent with Ali et al. (2006), Van der Tas’s (1988) I index and Archer et al.’s (1995) modified C index were used to measure the extent of harmonization.

It was found that the level of measurement harmonization has significantly improved over the years in selected South Asian countries.

The results suggest that the harmonization of accounting will most likely ensure a greater level of transparency and uniformity in corporate reporting practices (measurement) in South Asian countries and throughout the world as promoted by the IASB.