Search results

This paper examines the relationship between environmental uncertainty and tax avoidance at the firm level. We posit that managers faced with more uncertain environments are likely to engage in more tax avoidance activities. We find a significant and negative relationship between environmental uncertainty and effective tax rates, and our results persist through a battery of robust checks. We further find that managerial ability mitigates the above relationship. Moreover, we find that small, highly leveraged, and innovative firms operating in uncertain environments engage in more tax avoidance.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the stock market reactions at the time of new construction contract winning announcements to explore whether the managements made wise bidding decisions and thus create values.

A total of 813 new contracts awarded to publicly traded US construction firms for the years 2000 through 2009 are screened and these are analyzed by applying event study methodology. This paper estimates the effect of an event on stock market’s responses, using cumulative abnormal returns (CARs), and the CAR values are estimated for four types of windows: days 0 (i.e. the day of the event announcement), (−1, +1), (−2, +2), and (−3, +3). The market responses are further subdivided according to such variables as the project type, owner type, project location, work scope, and bidder size.

The results of this study show that the stock market did not curse contract winners by positively responding to the announcements of new contract awards. The sample firms’ market value, on average, is increased by 1.168 percent during the seven-day window period, and is highly significant. In addition, the followings are observed: first, the stock market tends to favor larger contracts over smaller ones; second, small firms’ events receive better market responses than those of large ones; and third, the level of returns varies considerably across the project types. Meanwhile, no statistical differences are observed in CARs for the owner type, work scope, and project location variables.

This study has several limitations. First, potential factors that may have effects on CAR could not be incorporated in the analysis, because a contract award announcement provides only limited information. Second, the level of consistency between stock market responses and the contract’s actual outcomes could not be assessed.

Wise bidding decision has critical implication considering the impact of a new contract award on a firm; a new contract increases the backlog of a firm while it may harm/improve the operating performance or decrease/increase the stockholders’ wealth. Although the overall success level of the current sample, in terms of CARs, is positive and significant, CAR values vary significantly depending on the window period and/or variables. Therefore, managements should exercise careful discretion in selecting a target project and arriving at a bidding decision.

While event study has been widespread for assessing the effect of numerous event types, project award received scarcely any attention. Moreover, it has widely been believed that cost/pricing and contract value are the primary sources for winners’ curse argument. Accordingly, this study can be considered as a seminal work assessing stock market responses to validate winners’ curse argument. This study contributes to the body of knowledge of decision-making discipline. In addition, from a strategic management perspective, the evidence and implications drawn from the analysis results will be valuable resources for bid or no-bid decision making in the project-based industry.

This study aims to investigate research scholars’ and faculty members’ perception, participation in collection development, satisfaction with the adequacy of the library collection and challenges faced during the recommendation of resources in selected university libraries of Northern India.

The data was collected with the help of a structured questionnaire from the research scholars and faculty members from all disciplines of five universities of Northern India. The comparison between the researchers and faculty members was carried out within the university, as well as across the universities. A total of 652 questionnaires were distributed, out of which 465 filled questionnaires were finally selected for data analysis. The collected data was analyzed with the help of SPSS and the hypotheses were tested using Chi-square (χ²) test.

The survey results found significant differences in awareness of collection development policy (CDP), as well as the recommendation of resources (i.e. textbooks, reference books, journals and magazines and non-book materials) between the research scholars and faculty members across the libraries. However, no significant difference was found between the opinion of the research scholars and faculty members on the adequacy of library collection across the libraries.

The study was limited to five university libraries of North India which included Maharishi Dayanand University (Rohtak) and Kurukshetra University (Kurukshetra) from the State of Haryana Panjab University from Union Territory of Chandigarh and Punjabi University (Patiala) and Guru Nanak Dev University (Amritsar) from the state of Punjab.

The outcomes of this study will undoubtedly help the library authorities and management to understand the awareness of users (i.e. research scholars and faculty members) about the collection development process such as CDP of the library, kind of resources recommend, their assessment on adequacy of different kind of resources and their ultimate satisfaction from it.

The study is an extensive survey about the perception and participation of research scholars and faculty members in the collection development process of their respective libraries and indicates their satisfaction from the library collection.

When there are few treated clusters in a pure treatment or difference-in-differences setting, t tests based on a cluster-robust variance estimator can severely over-reject. Although procedures based on the wild cluster bootstrap often work well when the number of treated clusters is not too small, they can either over-reject or under-reject seriously when it is. In a previous paper, we showed that procedures based on randomization inference (RI) can work well in such cases. However, RI can be impractical when the number of possible randomizations is small. We propose a bootstrap-based alternative to RI, which mitigates the discrete nature of RI p values in the few-clusters case. We also compare it to two other procedures. None of them works perfectly when the number of clusters is very small, but they can work surprisingly well.

We analyze the quality of accounting information reported by public firms in Latin America and United States of America.

To reach our objective, an exploratory and descriptive research was developed. To analyze the dimensions of accounting information quality, the operational model present in literature were applied which assess the persistence in earnings (Dechow & Schrand, 2004), the level of conservatism (Ball & Shivakumar, 2005), accounting earnings management (Pae, 2005) and accruals quality measurement (Dechow & Dichev, 2002), in a sample composed of publicly traded companies in the markets of Latin America and the North America (represented by USA), totaling 2,526 companies, from 2005 to 2011.

Our results evidenced that financial reporting of Latin-American companies are less conservative (except for Brazilian companies) and has similar level of earnings management in comparison to the North-American ones. Concerning to the quality of accruals it was observed that there are significant differences especially related to accruals of Brazilian companies.

Our results suggest differences in the quality of accounting information, originated by the economic environment where the company is inserted. So, investors must be careful when they are comparing firms between these markets, because the results were different for some cases, which may lead the investors to make misallocation of his resources.

We expanded previous literature by the use of various proxies for accounting quality, comparing firms on emerging markets with the major capital market (USA), and the crises period of time.

Several studies have observed that stocks tend to drop by an amount that is less than the dividend on the ex-dividend day, the so-called ex-dividend day anomaly. However, there still remains a lack of consensus for a single explanation of this anomaly. Different from other studies, this dissertation attempts to answer the primary research question: how can investors make trading profits from the ex-dividend day anomaly and how much can they earn? With this goal, I examine the economic motivations of equity investors through four main hypotheses identified in the anomaly's literature: the tax differential hypothesis, the short-term trading hypothesis, the tick size hypothesis, and the leverage hypothesis.

While the U.S. ex-dividend anomaly is well studied, I examine a long data window (1975–2010) of Thailand data. The unique structure of the Thai stock market allows me to assess all four main hypotheses proposed in the literature simultaneously. Although I extract the sample data from two data sources, I demonstrate that the combined data are consistently sampled. I further construct three trading strategies – “daily return,” “lag one daily return,” and “weekly return” – to alleviate the potential effect of irregular data observation.

I find that the ex-dividend day anomaly exists in Thailand, is governed by the tax differential, and is driven by short-term trading activities. That is, investors trade heavily around the ex-dividend day to reap the benefits of the tax differential. I find mixed results for the predictions of the tick size hypothesis and results that are inconsistent with the predictions of the leverage hypothesis.

I conclude that, on the Stock Exchange of Thailand, juristic and foreign investors can profitably buy stocks cum-dividend and sell them ex-dividend while local investors should engage in short sale transactions. On average, investors who employ the daily return strategy have earned significant abnormal return up to 0.15% (45.66% annualized rate) and up to 0.17% (50.99% annualized rate) for the lag one daily return strategy. Investors can also make a trading profit by conducting the weekly return strategy and earn up to 0.59% (35.67% annualized rate), on average.

Recently, it has been suggested that macroeconomic forecasts from estimated dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) models tend to be more accurate out-of-sample than random walk forecasts or Bayesian vector autoregression (VAR) forecasts. Del Negro and Schorfheide (2013) in particular suggest that the DSGE model forecast should become the benchmark for forecasting horse-races. We compare the real-time forecasting accuracy of the Smets and Wouters (2007) DSGE model with that of several reduced-form time series models. We first demonstrate that none of the forecasting models is efficient. Our second finding is that there is no single best forecasting method. For example, typically simple AR models are most accurate at short horizons and DSGE models are most accurate at long horizons when forecasting output growth, while for inflation forecasts the results are reversed. Moreover, the relative accuracy of all models tends to evolve over time. Third, we show that there is no support to the common practice of using large-scale Bayesian VAR models as the forecast benchmark when evaluating DSGE models. Indeed, low-dimensional unrestricted AR and VAR forecasts may forecast more accurately.

The purpose of this chapter is to assess the notion, measurement, and impact of institutional “public value” in an effort to determine its relevance, origin, and implementable government focus to create, maintain, and stimulate national productivity/wealth.

A literature review is presented along with the conceptualization of the public value thinking; an empirical analysis (in force of accredited official dataset-information) will test research assumptions.

The chapter identifies both the main features of “public value” and the possible impacts of public domain on the quality of private institutions and relating markets functioning (financial, labor, goods, technology), through aggregate statistics.

The public value dynamics may be affected variously by the different context factors/cultures characterizing the international economies/years examined. Nonetheless, global statistics/indicators appear as interesting as significant.

The endeavor of this chapter is to invite scholars, administrators, and practitioners to take into consideration the findings and stimulate the government/management of public value (which is more and more entrepreneurial) also for facilitating doing business.

This study contributes to shed light on the complex mechanisms of accumulation and diffusion of public value addressing future research on the role of property rights, ethicality, undue influence, institutional efficiency, and security.

The hendiadys “Value” and “Public” has been for several years examined mostly from the normative viewpoint. This chapter moves on to the field of practical assessment of public institutions by adopting an econometric model which points to identify concrete drivers and relating effects on productivity.