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This paper examines the association between audit committee (AC) governance characteristics and their role effectiveness. Its objective is to contribute a more comprehensive model and new evidence from Australia that complements and extends recent studies from different country settings on characteristics, roles and effectiveness of ACs.

The sampling frame is Australian listed companies, over the years 2004 to 2009, consisting of 180 observations. The study applies multiple regressions to validate the hypotheses and models.

Results reveal that stronger AC independence and competence, but not diligence, is significantly related to a lower incidence and severity of financial restatements (i.e. to a higher integrity of financial statements). However, greater AC diligence, but not independence or competence, is significantly related to lower non‐audit fee ratio (i.e. to higher external auditor independence).

The paper highlights salient links between an AC's governance characteristics and its effectiveness in fulfilling certain governance roles. Also it expands current literature by presenting a comprehensive empirical model along with statistical measures for AC governance characteristics.

Previous studies have not drawn AC governance characteristics together in a comprehensive model or provided evidence beyond the North American and European setting. A further original feature is the measurement of AC competence in terms of collective members' combined financial sophistication and industry knowledge.

The effect of layoff announcements on the shareholder returns of 154 firms that announced layoffs in 1993‐1994 was examined with event study methodology. As expected, the returns to these firms were negative. Further, the returns to the firms that announced layoffs for “reactive” reasons were more negative than the returns to the firms that announced layoffs for “proactive” reasons. The effect of employment guarantee announcements on the shareholder returns of 13 firms that announced employment guarantees in 1993‐1994 and on the returns of 63 firms that made similar announcements throughout the 1990 s was examined. Returns of these samples also responded negatively to the announcements. When the response to the two types of announcements was compared, however, there was no clear conclusion regarding which type of announcement drew a more negative response.

Since the 1960s, experts have predicted that we are on the verge of curing cancer. The purpose of this paper is to explore the obstacles to progress, and to propose policies that will lead more quickly to more success.

To speed future cures, we need to look at the traits, and methods of those innovative medical entrepreneurs who achieved breakthroughs in the past, and learn what institutions and policies enabled, or blocked, their progress.

Breakthrough innovators tend to be less-credentialed outsiders who “see what others do not see,” often by nimble and persistent pursuit of serendipitous discoveries or slow hunches. For example, Freireich and DeVita were less-credentialed outsiders. Freireich cured childhood leukemia and DeVita cured Hodgkin’s lymphoma, by pursuing nimble trial-and-error experimentation in their anti-cancer chemotherapy cocktails. Min Chiu Li pursued his slow hunch that his patients would benefit from longer chemotherapy than the mandated National Cancer Institute protocol allowed. He was fired, but his patients were cured. Today, FDA-mandated regulatory protocols, often defended as applications of the precautionary principle, greatly restrict innovative medical entrepreneurs, thereby delaying cancer cures and costing lives.

The paper proposes a new approach to medical innovation, allowing cancer researchers to engage in trial-and-error experiments that follow up on serendipitous discoveries and plausible hunches. The result will be more cures and longer lives.

The purpose of this paper is to examine how executive pay schemes influence managerial efficiency, which the authors measure as the risk-adjusted firm performance.

The authors utilized hierarchical regression to test the hypotheses.

The authors find that as options constitute a higher percentage of total compensation packages, subsequent firm risk-adjusted performance declines. The authors also find an inverse relationship between TMT stock ownership and risk-adjusted performance.

The findings suggest that the firm stakeholders should reconsider the likely influence of option-based incentives and equity holdings on the risk-adjusted performance.

Most executive compensation research focuses on either the pay-to-performance or pay-to-risk links. However, in this paper, the authors combine both the performance and risk dimensions simultaneously.

The long-debated impact of right-to-work (RTW) laws took on more urgency with the passage of RTW in additional states in the twenty-first century. The impact of RTW on shareholder wealth of corporations located in four states is evaluated here: Oklahoma (2000), Indiana (2012), Michigan (2012), and Wisconsin (2015). Event study results show that RTW had a positive effect on shareholder wealth in these states, albeit an effect that was lower in Michigan than elsewhere. We argue that this is indirect evidence in support of research indicating that RTW hinders union organizing, raises profits, and reduces nonunion employee compensation.

This study uses parametric hazard models to investigate duration dependence in US stock market cycles over the January 1929 through December 1992 period. Market cycles are determined using the Beveridge‐Nelson (1981) approach to the decomposition of economic time series. The results show that both real and nominal cycles exhibit positive duration dependence. The implication of this finding is that actual prices revert to their permanent or trend level in a non‐random manner as the cyclical component dissipates over time. This process is consistent with mean reversion in price and suggests that predictable periodicity in market cycles may exist. Only limited evidence is obtained that discrete shifts or trends in mean cycle duration exist. The length of market cycles appears not to have changed over the 1929–92 period.