Search results

Arguing that the print media act as a claims-making forum for the social construction and contestation of crises, the aim of this paper is to explore how the print media mediated two audits commissioned following a high-profile salary cap breach in the National Rugby League (NRL) in Australia.

This paper draws upon critical discourse analysis to examine the media coverage of the two audits by the two major Australian media organisations, News Limited and Fairfax Media Limited. The analysis is based on a qualitative study complemented by quantitative techniques that explore critical incidents and representations in the daily press.

The paper illustrates the way in which News Limited, the owner of the infringing club, mobilised its media platform to promote favourable viewpoints and interpretations and how these were challenged in the Fairfax press. Evidence of both coverage bias and statement bias in the treatment of the two audits is produced.

This paper provides evidence that commercial interests of owner/publishers coloured media coverage of the two audits, which were central pillars of the crisis management strategy of News Limited and the NRL. Implications for the media's contribution to public accountability, accounting outputs and impression management, and the growing commercial diversification and reach of media outlets are considered.

The training of highly skilled officers in rescue forces is essential for success and performance of fire brigades in their daily work. The purpose of this paper is to develop a validated instrument assessing the quality of leadership trainings in firefighter education.

In Study 1, relevant factors of teaching quality in this specific context are established using semi-structured interviews (n=5 trainer, n=59 trainees), and a pool of corresponding survey items is tested in a pilot sample (n=7 trainer, n=26 trainees). In Study 2 (n=263 trainees), we select best-fitting items and explore the structure of latent variables via exploratory factor analyses. Study 3 (n=45 trainer, n=380 trainees) tests this structure by means of confirmatory analyses and validates the questionnaire using scales from other evaluation instruments for higher education.

Analyses resulted in a six-dimensional questionnaire reflecting relevant training processes and outcomes. Results suggest that the newly created Feedback Instrument for Rescue forces Education (FIRE) meets all relevant psychometric quality criteria.

By examining critical factors of training quality, the authors enhance the understanding of critical processes in programs for rescue forces education. The developed questionnaire provides trainers and educational institutions with a validated tool to measure these relevant processes and the desired training outcomes. Therefore, the FIRE scales can contribute to an ongoing improvement of rescue forces trainings.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the presence the behavioral biases in Indian investors specifically, overconfidence, excessive optimism (pessimism), herd behavior and the disposition effect. It further investigates the role of demographics and investor sophistication in influencing the biases. Finally, it reveals which bias is most prevalent in the Indian context.

For this purpose, a survey has been conducted on the investors of the Delhi/NCR area. The data have been collected with the help of a structured questionnaire that is analyzed with the help of relevant statistical tools.

The survey evidence shows that behavioral biases are dependent on investors’ demographics and their trading sophistication with highest influencing factors being age, profession and trading frequency. Each bias corresponds to a specific set of investor characteristics and overconfidence comes out to be the most important bias in the Indian context.

The potential limitations of the present survey can be ascribed to socially desirable responses and their difference with actual market behavior. Further, due to time and resource constraint, the data set is limited to investors of only Delhi/NCR.

This study is most relevant for financial advisors, as it facilitates them in gaining a better understanding of their clients’ psychology. It can aid them in developing behaviorally modified portfolio, which best suits their clients’ predisposition.

The paper gives a unique insight on the investors’ profile corresponding to each bias under consideration. It not only updates the evidence on behavioral biases but also highlights which bias is the most influential in the Indian context.

In this paper, the authors examine the association between conditional conservatism and deviations of the first digits of financial statement items from what are expected by Benford's Law.

This research uses data of companies listed on the London Stock Exchange. The authors measure deviations of first digits from Benford's Law following Amiram et al. (2015) and firm-year conditional conservatism following previous studies (Basu, 1997; Khan and Watts, 2009; García Lara et al., 2016). The authors use multiple regressions to provide evidence for their hypothesis.

The results show that conditional conservatism is positively associated with deviations from Benford's Law. The findings are robust across different measures of deviations and conditional conservatism. Also, the authors find that the relationship between deviations from Benford's Law and conditional conservatism is more pronounced for firms with debt issuance, and for leveraged firms facing financial distress. Next, the authors’ analyses confirm previous evidence by showing that the first digits of financial statement items of UK listed companies conform to Benford's Law at the firm-specific level and the market level, and deviations of income statements are larger than those of balance sheets and cash flow statements.

The research makes significant contributions to the literature. First, this is the first study that provides empirical evidence suggesting that conditional conservatism may be a source of deviations from Benford’s Law. Second, the authors provide evidence confirming previous US findings (e.g. Amiram et al., 2015) showing that the distributions of first digits of financial statement items of UK listed companies also conform to Benford's Law.

The authors’ findings have implications for auditors. Auditors should be aware of “false positive” for material misstatements when using Benford's Law as a risk assessment procedure. While both conditional conservatism and earnings management are related to deviations from Benford's Law, conservatism-related biases could indicate less audit risks.

The authors provide new and original evidence suggesting that conditional conservatism is related to deviations from Benford's Law.

We review and analyze the accounting literature that examines the effects of accounting conservatism on financial statements and financial statement users. We begin by analyzing how conservatism affects the reported numbers on the financial statements. These studies primarily evaluate how conservatism affects earnings quality, including earnings persistence and the presence of earnings management. Next, we assess the effect of accounting conservatism on the users of the financial statements. We identify three primary users of the financial statements: (1) equity market users (2) debt market users and (3) corporate governance users. Within each of these categories, we analyze the findings of prior research and explore unanswered research questions. By analyzing the effects of accounting conservatism from a diverse range of research topics, we inform the discussion on the costs and benefits of accounting conservatism.

The purpose of this paper is to establish the optimal decision-making style in a fast-paced, complex, and dynamic environment.

Three decision-making attributes are explored: the use of intuition vs analysis, the proclivity to heuristics, and susceptibility to bias. The intuition/analysis is tested with a questionnaire that has been validated in prior research, while information on the two other dimensions is from an exploratory survey designed for this purpose. Responses to the survey questions provide some insight into the differential decision-making style of elite NHL hockey coaches’ vis-à-vis amateur coaches and news reporters.

The data suggest elite decision makers have no preference for intuitive or analytical settings, but exhibit a significantly higher perception of their ability to perform in both. While current literature shows sports athletes to be more intuitive, it appears coaches excel on the analytical dimension instead. This study finds that while elite hockey coaches have fewer biases overall, they tend in particular to be overly optimistic in comparison to amateur coaches and news reporters.

The main limitation in this paper is that the survey on heuristics and biases is exploratory, making these results less robust than the findings on intuition and analysis.

This paper is first to extend the decision-making literature to coaches, and among few papers that obtain insights from NHL coaches directly. The findings are likely to extend to corporate leadership as well, increasing the relevance of the results.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the experiences of gender bias among women hospital CEOs and explore to what these female leaders attribute their success within a male-dominated hospital executive leadership milieu.

This qualitative study involved 12 women hospital CEOs from across Ontario, Canada. Purposeful sampling techniques and in-depth qualitative interview methods were used to facilitate discussion around experiences of gender and leadership.

Responses fell into two groups: the first group represented the statement “Gender inequality is alive and well”. The second group reflected the statement “Gender inequity is not significant, did not happen to me, and things are better now”. This group contained a sub-group with no consciousness of systemic discrimination and that claimed having no gendered experiences in their leadership journey. The first group described gender issues in various contexts, from the individual to the systemic. The second group was ambivalent about gender as a factor impacting leadership trajectories.

Representations of women’s leadership have become detached from feminism, with major consequences for women. This study reveals how difficult it is for some women CEOs to identify gender bias. The subtle everyday norms and practices within the workplace make it difficult to name and explain gender bias explicitly and may explain the challenges in understanding how it might affect a woman’s career path.

The purpose of this paper is to examine whether the repetition effect bias noted in prior psychology literature impacts auditor judgments. Were auditors to succumb to this bias, repeated statements would be perceived to have higher validity than single exposure to the same statement, potentially impairing subsequent judgments, including audit opinions and thereby undermining audit quality.

Multiple explanatory hypotheses, including repeated explanations, were evaluated by audit seniors in an experimental analytical procedures setting where the nature (error or non‐error) and number (six or ten) of explanations was varied.

Auditors were not found to exhibit a repetition effect (measured as an absolute increase in perceived validity) however differences did occur in their judgments owing to both the nature and number of explanations considered. Consistently the likelihood for repeated items on short lists was increased and on longer it was decreased, while for non‐errors it was increased and for errors it was decreased.

These results suggest that audit quality could be impaired if auditors do not consider a broad set of plausible explanations, particularly where they receive repeated non‐error explanations.

No prior study has addressed this issue in this context.