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Los Angeles -- Don't get me wrong --this was visual radio on a budget. But it got the job done. I'm a Belgian radio host/producer living in Los Angeles and [...]

To purchase or authenticate to the full-text of this article, please visit this link: http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-629X.2007.00246.x Byline: Kieran James (a), Janice How (b), Peter Verhoeven (b) Keywords: Accounting choice; Bid premium; Intangible assets; Purchased goodwill; Signalling theory Abstract: Abstract This research explores the empirical association between takeover bid premium and acquired (purchased) goodwill, and tests whether the strength of the association changes after the passage of approved accounting standard AASB 1013 in Australia in 1988. AASB 1013 mandated capitalization and amortization of acquired goodwill to the income statement over a maximum period of 20 years. We use regressions to assess how the association between bid premium and acquired goodwill varies in the pre-AASB and post-AASB 1013 periods after controlling for confounding factors. Our results show that reducing the variety of accounting policy options available to bidder management after an acquisition results in a systematic reduction in the strength of the association between premium and goodwill. Author Affiliation: (a)School of Accounting, Economics & Finance, University of Southern Queensland, Toowoomba, 4350, Australia (b)Department of Accounting and Finance, University of Auckland, Auckland, 1020, New Zealand Article History: Received 10 October 2006; accepted 8 November 2007 by Robert Faff (Edit).

This study examines the perspectives of corporate managers regarding corporate social responsibility (CSR), stakeholder interest management, firm performance, and their preferences in capital budgeting. It uses structural equation modelling (SEM) to test hypotheses. The analysis shows that capital budgeting serves as a mediator, diminishing the direct relationship between CSR and firm performance, and between the management of stakeholder interests and firm performance. The findings indicate that instrumental motives guide corporate managers in their capital budgeting decisions. The paper challenges perspectives that disproportionately emphasize the benevolent and moral dimensions of CSR, highlighting the significance of stakeholder interest management as a credible and essential business practice.

Dividend initiations are an economically significant event that has important implications for a firm’s future financial capacity. Given the market’s expectation of a consistent payout, managers of IPO firms must approach the initial dividend decision cautiously. We compare the long-run performance of IPO firms that initiated a dividend with that of similarly matched non-payers, and find robust results that firms which initiated a dividend perform significantly better up to five years after the initiation date. Further tests show that the post-initiation firm performance is explained mostly by dividend theory of signalling rather than free cash flow.

In 2001, the Malaysian Code on Corporate Governance (MCCG) became an integral part of the Bursa Malaysia Listing Rules, which requires all listed firms to disclose the extent of compliance with the MCCG. Our panel analysis of 440 firms from 1999 to 2002 finds that corporate governance reform in Malaysia has been successful, with a significant improvement in governance practices. The relationship between ownership by the Employees Provident Fund (EPF) and corporate governance has strengthened during the period subsequent to the reform, in line with the lead role taken by the EPF in establishing the Minority Shareholders Watchdog Group. The implementation of MCCG has had a substantial effect on shareholders' wealth, increasing stock prices by an average of about 4.8%. Although there is no evidence that politically connected firms perform better, political connections do have a significantly negative effect on corporate governance, which is mitigated by institutional ownership.

Abstract: This paper uses high frequency data to evaluate whether information asymmetry in the market is reduced subsequent to corporate earnings and dividend announcements. Changes in the level of information asymmetry due to the announcements are proxied by the rate of change in trading volume, bid-ask spread, cumulative abnormal returns, and order imbalance. Our results show that the release of earnings and dividend reduces information asymmetry, proxied by bid-ask spread and order imbalance. There is no significant change in trading volume. The significant change in cumulative abnormal returns suggests that the announcements have information content. Cross-sectional analysis shows that forecast errors and the timing of the announcements are somewhat related to the change in information asymmetry. Some interaction effects of earnings and dividend on the change in information asymmetry are documented. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Although the generalised autoregressive conditional heteroskedasticity (GARCH) model has been quite successful in capturing important empirical aspects of financial data, particularly for the symmetric effects of volatility, it has had far less success in capturing the effects of extreme observations, outliers and skewness in returns. This paper examines the GARCH model under various non-normal error distributions in order to evaluate skewness and leptokurtosis. The empirical results show that GARCH models estimated using asymmetric leptokurtic distributions are superior to their counterparts estimated under normality, in terms of: (i) capturing skewness and leptokurtosis; (ii) the maximized log-likelihood values; and (iii) isolating the ARCH and GARCH parameter estimates from the adverse effects of outliers. Overall, the flexible asymmetric Student’s t-distribution performs best in capturing the non-normal aspects of the data. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

This paper investigates the use of a flexible forecasting method based on non-linear Markov modelling and canonical variate analysis, and the use of a prediction algorithm to forecast conditional volatility. We assess the dynamic behaviour of the model by forecasting volatility of a stock index. It is found that the non-linear non-parametric model based on canonical variate analysis forecasts stock index volatility significantly better than the GJR-GARCH(1,1)-t model due to the flexibility in accommodating multiple dynamic patterns in volatility which are not captured by its parametric counterpart. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

A detailed re-investigation of the complexation of zinc(II) and cadmium(II) ions by cyanide at high pH values has been made in aqueous 3 M NaCl medium at 25°C using glass electrode potentiometry. Both metal ion systems gave clear evidence for the formation of ternary hydroxocyano complexes although only the Zn(II) species could be characterised quantitatively due to the lack of quantitative information for the Cd(II)-OH- complexes in this medium. A detailed computational analysis using the ESTA suite of programs has been made, including an assessment of the effects of error propagation in these highly correlated systems by Monte Carlo simulation. Formation constants are derived for the binary H+-, Zn(II)-, and Cd(II}-CN- systems and ternary Zn(II)CN--OH- system. For both metal ions a maximum coordination number of four was found even for the ternary systems. The absence of higher coordination number complexes was confirmed by FTIR and 13C NMR spectroscopy.