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This study aims to explore whether investors’ inattention is associated with firms’ environmental, social and governance (ESG) decoupling, which is defined as the misalignment between the implementation and incorporation of ESG policies.

Focusing on a sample of the components of ESG ratings for China Securities Index (CSI) 300 companies between 2017 and 2019, the authors test the relationship between firms’ ESG decoupling level and mutual fund investors’ distraction by applying exogenous shocks to their portfolios.

The results show that firms with distracted mutual fund investors engage in more external than internal ESG actions, leading to a high ESG decoupling level. Mutual fund investors use “threat of exit” rather than “voice” as a governance mechanism to influence corporate ESG decoupling. While external ESG actions mitigate stock price crash risk, internal ESG actions increase firm value; firms with a high ESG decoupling level suffer lower valuations.

This study has implications for increasing the congruence between firms’ external and internal ESG actions, thereby improving firms’ ESG performance and long-term economic outcomes.

This paper helps policy-makers and regulators to reassess how ESG policies can be implemented to be consistent with organizations’ core business activities.

Contributing to prior studies of greenwashing and corporate social responsibility decoupling, this paper extends decoupling literature by revisiting ESG impacts in an integrated framework and explores the antecedents of corporate ESG decoupling from the perspective of institutional investor monitoring.

On September 3, 2003, New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer announced what quickly became the gravest scandal in the mutual fund industry in the 65 years since Congress passed the Investment Company Act of 1940. Spitzer’s office discovered that some hedge funds had been permitted to trade shares of open‐end mutual funds after that day’s net asset value (NAV) for those mutual funds had been set (typically at 4:00 PM eastern time). This practice allowed the hedge funds to profit based on corporate news announcements released after that time, and therefore not reflected in the mutual funds’ daily NAV. Moreover, Spitzer disclosed that some mutual fund advisers had only selectively enforced the stated limits in their prospectuses on frequent trading, or market timing, of those mutual funds. In some cases, mutual fund advisers had permitted selected investors to conduct frequent trading in mutual funds in return for investments (sometimes referred to as “sticky assets”) in other investment vehicles, or had permitted frequent trading by officers of the adviser itself. And some mutual fund advisers had selectively disclosed information about portfolio holdings of the funds to hedge funds that used that information to arbitrage the mutual funds’ positions. This was the second major securities industry scandal uncovered by Spitzer’s office in just two years. In 2002, Spitzer’s office uncovered the research analyst independence scandal that culminated in a global settlement with the country’s major investment banks. Spitzer’s 15‐person Securities Bureau appeared more nimble and better informed than the thousands of staff members at the Securities and Exchange Commission, the federal agency charged with regulating the mutual fund industry. The SEC ‐ already under fire for the unprecedented wave of corporate and brokerage industry scandals that led to adoption of the Sarbanes‐Oxley Act ‐ had to endure yet another round of vocal public criticism.

The paper explores how the implementation of performance budgeting unfolds public managers' attention and responses to competing accountability demands over time.

This is a longitudinal study of one Russian municipality's implementation of PB under central government pressures during 2013–2017. Using triangulation of 25 interviews, documentary analysis and field observations, we employed institutional logics to guide the study.

The paper demonstrates the dynamic properties of PB construction under competing accountability demands via the “creative distraction” metaphor. PB was a “distraction” mechanism, which, on one hand, strengthened external accountability, while, on the other, distracting the municipality from internal municipal demands. Nevertheless, this “distraction” was also “creative,” as it produced proactive responses to competing accountability demands and creative effects over time. Specifically, PB also led to elements of creative PB negotiations between departments when managers started cooperating with redirecting the irrelevant constraints of performance information in budgeting into necessary manipulations for municipal survival. The demonstrated “creative distraction” is explained by the changing institutional logics of public managers supplemented by a set of individual factors.

The paper responds to the recent calls to study PB practice under several accountability demands over time. In this regard, we show the value of public managers' existing institutional logics as they shape PB's capacity to balance competing accountability demands. As we revealed, this capacity can be limited, due to possible misalignment between managers' attention toward “what to give an account for” during budget formation (input orientation driven by OPA logic) and “what is demanded” with the introduction of PB (output orientation driven by NPM logic). Yet, the elements of proactive managerial responses are still evident over time, explained by a set of individual factors within the presented case, namely: learning NPM logic, strengthened informal relationships and a common saturation point reflected by managers.

This analysis is the first to explore the overall roles of the offsetting attraction and distraction influences of earnings news in shaping the level of attention given to the equity market by market participants.

We use multivariate regression approach and examine how trading activity levels within the set of non-announcing firms varies with respect to collective measures of contemporaneous earnings announcement visibility. We employ attention and information transfer theories in our hypothesis development.

This analysis is the first to explore the overall roles of the offsetting attraction and distraction influences of earnings news in shaping the level of attention given to the equity market by market participants. Specifically, we examine how the number of earnings announcement activity affects investor attention as measured by trading volume given to the set of non-announcing firms. We find that while earnings announcement numbers lower trading volume responses to earnings news among announcing firms (consistent with Hirshleifer et al., 2009), their distractive influence does not carry over into the market as a whole. More importantly, investor attention to both the overall market and the larger subset of non-announcing firms increase in response to earnings news activity levels. However, after decomposing the announcers as same-industry and different-industry announcers, we find that investor attention to the non-announcing segment of the market increases with the number of same-industry announcers, but actually seems to decrease (i.e. they distract attention) with the number of different-industry announcers. We also find that the associated earnings surprise brings attention to non-announcing firms (consistent with earnings news is relevant to overall market price movements). Finally, we find that distraction effects are attenuated in the financial crisis period.

A promising area of future research is to examine the relation between market pricing efficiency and aggregate earnings activity for the set of non-announcing firms. Although it will be a challenging task to measure pricing efficiency for the non-announcers, this will complement the prior literature only focusing on the announcing segment of the market.

First, instead of assessing the impact of number of earnings announcements on the subset of announcing firms, which is a micro-level perspective, we identify the impact of news arrivals on all firms in the market including the vastly larger set of non-announcing firms. Second, by decomposing the number of announcements into industry-related and -unrelated news we show that different types of news arrivals spark investor attention differently, suggesting the importance of categorizing the news into related and unrelated industries.

A potential future area of research identified by our analysis is to investigate what type of investors' attention is distracted or attracted during the earnings announcements. A promising area of future research is to examine the relation between market pricing efficiency and aggregate earnings activity for the set of non-announcing firms.

This paper is the first one exploring the overall roles of the offsetting attraction and distraction influences of earnings announcements in shaping the level of investor attention given to the equity market by market participants. Our findings should be of interest to investors, analysts, security market regulators and researchers.

The purpose of this paper is to offer an integrated approach for understanding the relations among the theoretical and operational antecedents of consumer involvement in the context of financial products. The theoretical antecedents of involvement have been conceptualized as the consumer's personal profile, purchase situation, and target product; the operational antecedent includes the purchase availability manipulation.

The research is based on a field study among private customers of a leading financial institute and on two experimental designs within lab settings. The independent variables include the theoretical and operational antecedents and the dependent measure comprises the involvement measure.

The findings emphasize that the theoretical antecedents constitute an effective manipulation of involvement, whereas the operational antecedent has only limited effect.

Financial managers should consider the type of financial service, distribution channel, social context and advertising medium, in conjunction with the consumer's profile, to increase the overall involvement.

The research provides a new view at the way predictions of involvement are formed within the financial context. This view is enabled by including the antecedents of product involvement along with the manipulation of product availability. When these components are considered jointly, a richer set of predictions can be offered than previously conceptualized. To this end, the research calls for a more comprehensive approach for manipulating involvement that bases its activation on the theoretical antecedents.

This chapter outlines several approaches that researchers can use to help them conduct research that respects and includes autistic participants. It begins by highlighting some of the factors that should be considered before, during and after a study is conducted. It then explains some of the benefits and drawbacks of harvesting data from social media. It then concludes with a set of recommendations about inclusive research practices that can help autistic participants be equals in the research process.

The original contribution that this chapter gives to the field of autism spectrum research is to provide researchers with a clear and comprehensive outline of how to conduct research that is inclusive and respectful of autistic participants.

Mutual fund investors assess a fund manager’s skills when allocating their capital. To identify the rationale behind retail investors’ decisions, this study aims to examine the relation between mutual fund flows and abnormal returns (alpha), as well as the various risk factors in the Japanese mutual fund market, which has distinctive characteristics regarding investors and distributors.

Six standard asset pricing models are used to investigate how investors assess mutual fund managers’ skills: the market-adjusted return, the capital asset pricing model and the Fama–French three-factor model and its augmented versions.

Contrary to the literature, this study finds that investors in Japan mainly rely on alpha to assess mutual funds. In particular, investors respond to alpha for fund inflows and their evaluations depend on the market environment and their mutual fund search costs.

This study measures the response of investors to the skills of mutual fund managers in the Japanese market – especially for funds purchased through bank-related distributors that have aimed to capture inexperienced retail investors since deregulation in the 1990s – and reveals their high response to alpha.

The purpose of this paper is to examine how board compensation and holdings are related to mutual fund expense ratios. Previous studies find that compensation and expense ratios are positively correlated and argue that this relationship is potential evidence of rent sharing, whereby excessively compensated boards fail to negotiate with fund managers for lower shareholder fees.

Using a dataset of US open‐end mutual funds, the author examines how geographic‐based salary data, director profession, director fund holdings and fund returns might explain the relationship between compensation and fees.

The results provide additional support for potential rent sharing between fund managers and directors and are robust to alternative measures of director compensation, fund sales loads, director holdings and fund returns.

The findings are limited by the sample size and the lack of time series data of the hand‐collected dataset. Data are collected from 598 funds in the year 2003.

These findings suggest that mutual fund expense ratios may be affected by potential agency costs.

Mutual fund regulatory focus has been predominantly focused on the independence of board chairmen, but this study shows that compensation may also be a significant contributor to fund governance.

This study is unique in its recent focus on fund expense ratios and board compensation and examining potential explanations for this relationship.