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Article
Publication date: 20 July 2021

Laurence Ferry, Guanming He and Chang Yang

The authors investigate how executive pay and its gap with employee pay influence the performance of Thailand tourism listed companies.

Abstract

Purpose

The authors investigate how executive pay and its gap with employee pay influence the performance of Thailand tourism listed companies.

Design/methodology/approach

The authors manually collect data on the executives' and employees' remunerations for Thailand tourism listed companies and use the data for the authors’ OLS regression analysis. To check the robustness of the results to potential endogeneity issues, the authors employ the two-stage least-squares regression analysis and the impact threshold for a confounding variable approach.

Findings

The authors find that short-term executive compensation enhances firm performance, and that long-term executive compensation reduces the likelihood of unfavorable corporate performance. The authors also find that the gap in short-term pay between executives and employees has an inverted-U relation with firm performance.

Research limitations/implications

This study suggests that higher executive pay relative to employee pay could encourage executives to work hard to improve corporate performance, but that too large a pay gap between executives and employees could impair employees' morale and harm firm performance.

Practical implications

It is important for tourism companies to not only pay executives well but also avoid too large a pay gap between executives and employees.

Social implications

This study implies the important role of compensation design in contributing to employee engagement and good performance for tourism firms.

Originality/value

This study sheds light on agency problems between executives and employees in tourism companies and provides new evidence and insights on compensation research in the tourism sector in emerging markets.

Details

Journal of Hospitality and Tourism Insights, vol. 6 no. 1
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 2514-9792

Keywords

Article
Publication date: 30 April 2019

Guanming He, Lu Bai and Helen Mengbing Ren

Whether financial analysts play an effective role as information intermediaries and monitors has triggered a wide spread of debate among academics and practitioners to date. The…

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Abstract

Purpose

Whether financial analysts play an effective role as information intermediaries and monitors has triggered a wide spread of debate among academics and practitioners to date. The purpose of this paper is to complement this debate by investigating the association between analyst coverage and firm-specific future stock price crash risk.

Design/methodology/approach

Regression analysis is based on a large sample of US public firms and the crash risk measure of Hutton et al. (2009). Potential endogeneity concerns are alleviated by restricting the sample period to the post-Regulation-FD period and conducting an analysis of the impact threshold for a confounding variable method per Larcker and Rusticus (2010).

Findings

Evidence reveals that a high level of analyst coverage is associated with lower future stock price crash risk. Furthermore, the negative association between analyst coverage and stock price crash risk is stronger for firms that have high financial opacity. Additionally, analyst forecast pessimism is negatively associated with future crash risk.

Research limitations/implications

Our research provides evidence in support for the view that financial analysts play an active information intermediary role in a way that increases information transparency of a firm and reduces its crash risk. Also, our study offers support for the view that analysts perform an effective monitoring role in a way that constraints management’s bad news hoarding activities and reduces future crash risk.

Practical implications

This study is of interest to investors who seek analyst reports for their investment decision making and for information providers who demand external financing. The findings of this study also have some other important implications for practitioners, given the economic and welfare consequences of stock price crashes.

Originality/value

This study offers support for the view that analysts serve positive roles as information intermediaries and monitors in the US stock market.

Details

Journal of Applied Accounting Research, vol. 20 no. 1
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 0967-5426

Keywords

Article
Publication date: 8 June 2020

Guanming He and David Marginson

The purpose of this study is to examine the effect of insider trading on analyst coverage and the properties of analyst earnings forecasts. Given the central role of analysts for…

Abstract

Purpose

The purpose of this study is to examine the effect of insider trading on analyst coverage and the properties of analyst earnings forecasts. Given the central role of analysts for information diffusion in stock markets, advancing understanding of the role insider trades may play in analyst coverage and forecasts, especially in the context of a changing legal environment (e.g. the implementation of Regulation Fair Disclosure [Reg FD]), should be a worthy goal.

Design/methodology/approach

To address the research questions, the authors run regressions in which the authors identify and control for as many possible determinants of analyst coverage and forecasts (e.g. firm size, information asymmetry and earnings performance) that are correlated with insider trades. To alleviate endogeneity concerns, the authors use three approaches. First, the authors extend the sample period to the post-Reg-FD period in which managers are not allowed to provide private information to financial analysts. Second, the authors measure analyst coverage in a window that is lagged by insider trades. Third, the authors employ firm-fixed-effects regressions in all the multivariate tests. Finally, following Larcker and Rusticus (2010), the authors conduct the impact threshold for a confounding variable test to assure that all regression analyses are indeed immune to the potential correlated-omitted-variable bias.

Findings

The authors find that the level of analyst coverage is positively related to the intensity of insider trades and that analyst coverage is more strongly associated with insider purchases than with insider sales. The authors also find that the positive association between analyst coverage and insider trades is less pronounced after the passage of Reg FD. Further investigations reveal that analysts revise their earnings forecasts upward following insider purchases, the informativeness of analyst forecast revisions significantly increases following insider purchases and optimistic bias in analyst forecast revisions is reduced as a result of insider purchases; the authors do not find similar evidence for insider sales.

Research limitations/implications

A large body of insider trading literature (Johnson et al., 2009; Badertscher et al., 2011; Thevenot 2012; Skaife et al., 2013; Billings and Cedergren 2015; Dechow et al., 2016) provides evidence that insiders actively trade on their private information, such as their foreknowledge of price-relevant corporate events. This literature suggests that insider trades are potentially value-relevant and are informative about a firm’s future prospects. However, less research attention has been paid to investigating how insider trades might affect market participants’ (especially sophisticated participants’) behavior. This study contributes to understanding the role that insider trading may play in shaping analyst behavior.

Practical implications

Prior research (Frankel and Li, 2004; Lustgarten and Mande, 1995; Carpenter and Remmers, 2001; Seyhun, 1990) maintains that insider sales are less informative about a firm’s future prospects than are insider purchases because insider sales might take place for the liquidity and diversification purposes. By probing the stock price responses to insider selling activities, Lakonishok and Lee (2001), Jeng et al. (2003) and Fidrmuc et al. (2006) infer that insider selling is not informative about future firm performance. However, for such an inference, the authors cannot rule out the possibility that insider sales do convey value-relevant information, but the stock market does not react correctly to such trading information (Beneish and Vargus, 2002). Because the authors focus on examining analysts’ responses to insider sales, and analysts are supposed to be sophisticated in information processing, this study adds more compelling evidence for the notion that insider sales convey less information about a firm’s future prospects than do insider purchases.

Social implications

There is an ongoing debate about the benefits and drawbacks of insider trading. Opponents of insider trading view insider trades as inequitable and immoral and assert that restricting insider trades curbs resource misallocation and benefits the whole society. Proponents contend that insider trading accelerates the price discovery process, increases market efficiency (Leland, 1992; Bernhardt et al., 1995; Choi et al., 2016) and may even play a role in rewarding and motivating executives (Roulstone, 2003; Denis and Xu, 2013). The authors add to this debate by documenting that insider trading increases the amount of information valuable to analyst research activities and helps enhance analyst services.

Originality/value

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first to offer firm-level evidence of a positive association between insider trades and analyst coverage. By accounting for the post-Reg-FD regime, this paper is also the first to provide evidence on how analysts, in the absence of access to management’s private information because of the regime change by Reg FD, react to insider trades.

Details

Accounting Research Journal, vol. 33 no. 3
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 1030-9616

Keywords

Article
Publication date: 18 April 2008

Sheau‐yueh J. Chao

This paper seeks to discuss the genealogical sources for Chinese immigrants as well as the settlement of Chinese in the USA and the historical evolution of Chinese names, their…

Abstract

Purpose

This paper seeks to discuss the genealogical sources for Chinese immigrants as well as the settlement of Chinese in the USA and the historical evolution of Chinese names, their origins, arrangement and development. It aims to cover the origins of various classes of Chinese surnames, followed by the content description of a traditional genealogical book for jiapu.

Design/methodology/approach

The paper researches the various ways that a Chinese person can find out about their ancestry.

Findings

The paper reveals the roles of libraries, including serving the needs of patrons interested in genealogical research, preserving and interpreting information through oral and family history projects and collaborating with other libraries through interlibrary loan, document delivery, library consortia, collection management and international resource‐sharing.

Research limitations/implications

The study provides information on where and how to locate the genealogical resources for researching the genealogy of a Chinese family.

Originality/value

The paper analyzes the value of genealogical research as a documentary source for population history, life expectancy in a clan, marriages and family connections, as well as lineage organizations and inter‐lineage relations.

Details

Collection Building, vol. 27 no. 2
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 0160-4953

Keywords

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