Earnings Management and Stock Liquidity

This chapter tests whether the earnings management practices in Turkey are considered informative or opportunistic by outside investors by examining its effect on stock liquidity. Earnings management is measured by discretionary accruals calculated by two different competing methods. Stock liquidity is also proxied by two different measures: the illiquidity measure of Amihud and the turnover ratio. Amihud's illiquidity measure indicates firms' daily price responses associated with the trading volume and the turnover ratio indicates how many times a stock changes its owner in a year. Relevant control variables are also included in the models. A positive association between earnings management and stock liquidity implies informative earnings management and vice versa. Earnings management is found to be positively associated with stock market liquidity. Results favor the informative earnings management view for Turkish firms and are robust to alternative specifications of earnings management and stock liquidity measures.

Research on Corporate Governance

This chapter intends to contribute to the analysis of corporate governance (CG) practices through a bibliometric review of the existent literature in order to understand the current state of CG, providing an overview of the main trends in this field of research. Although there is extensive research on CG, no recent studies try to update the current state of the art on this topic. It is conducted a bibliometric analysis. The study describes the evolutional research studies published in the digital library Scopus between 2010 and 2019 and compares the results obtained in evolutionary terms. The bibliometric analysis is based in the Scopus database, leading to a total database of 4,430 documents. Regarding the most recent articles published, the study focuses on the period between 2018 and July 2020, ending with a final sample of 887 articles. Finally, a bibliometric analysis on the 16 scientific articles that were more cited in the more recent period is made. Research avenues are provided based on these results and on more recent published articles regarding the CG subject.

Analysis of Investment Decision Making in Private Hospitals

This study seeks to define a model outlining the importance of private hospital managers' competences the profile role of the manager private hospital the process and the relationship with analyses for investment decision making in private hospitals in order to orient future work to improve contribute to health institutions' performance. Qualitative interviews were held in Brazil and Canada, analysed through the conventional content analysis method, and coded using NVivo 11. A model of analysis for investment decision making is proposed and can be used to improve resource allocation and hospital performance. The results point out the importance of a multidisciplinary management training of managers that makes contributes to good an efficient use of resources and that contributes to maintains quality in patient care, including with regard to investment and financing of hospitals where performance analysis contributes to decision making.

The Social Responsibility of the Firm

This chapter pursues a normative approach to corporate governance, bridging economic theory on the nature of the firm and corporate management strategy. It intends to show that from a welfare economics perspective there is room for improvement if governments are willing to revisit the legal framework and redesign the institutional boundaries of the firm. In concrete, echoing concerns being put forward by the World Economic Forum and other international organisations, it is proposed that the social accountability of the modern corporation and its institutional boundaries should be revisited on legal grounds. A new role for top management is advanced in the context of principal-agent theory.

Executive Women and Firm Economic Value

This study analyses the relationship between gender diversity on the board of directors' executive roles and the firm economic value. Based on a sample of Portuguese non-financial listed firms, between 2010 and 2018, results show that executive female contribute to decrease the firm economic value-added, and CEO gender diversity to decrease market value added, while no impact is found to traditional performance measures. Since the presence of women on the board of Portuguese firms is still scarce, female presence is not seen as relevant to add value to firms. These results are pioneer since previous studies found no impact of female presence on boards on value added measures. Moreover, findings show the relevance of value-added measures to analyze performance and singularities compared to profitability measures.

Why Malaysian Companies Are Involved in Related Party Transactions (RPT) in the Context of Corporate Governance (CG)

The regulations related to corporate governance mechanisms such as the sensitivity of pay and performance of chief executive officers, board characteristics, and watches outside of those that are well connected in related party transactions (RPTs)in Malaysia are struggling from the monitoring and enforcement of good corporate governance. The primary aims of this study are to investigate the gap that exists in Malaysian company failures due to appropriate related party transactions and to evaluate the impact of good corporate governance on shareholders' confidence in related party transaction (RPTs) disclosures from the Malaysian Accounting Standards Board (MASB) of regulations. In the year 2000, a study was done by Claessens that examined the data of 236 Malaysian public organizations. The study found the dominancy of a large block of shareholders in organizations in addition to weak institutional structures. This chapter focuses on the usage of related party transactions undertaken to benefit Malaysian companies which have led to financial reporting disclosure information.

Institutional Investors' Representativeness and Earnings Management

In contexts characterized by high ownership concentration, institutional investors may lose their monitoring role and might not be effective in constraining earnings management. So, this study investigates whether directors appointed by institutional shareholders are more effective in inhibiting earnings management for companies with a high ownership concentration, rather than the mere presence of institutional investors. Based on a sample of Italian listed companies, findings suggest a negative relationship between minority directors appointed by institutional shareholders and abnormal accruals, while no relationship is found between the latter and the mere presence of institutional investors. Moreover, results also highlight that the difference between strategic and no strategic institutional investors does not count in a context characterized by high ownership concentration. Overall, this study suggests that institutional investors, regardless of their characteristics, are more effective in constraining earnings management when they can count on an agent on the board of directors.

Investigating the Relationship of Corporate Cash Holdings, Corporate Governance, and Firm Performance in Malaysia

Current practice shows that firms throughout the world are in favor of high cash holdings; yet, they are still performing well. This situation contradicts the agency and free cash flow theories, which suggest that excessive cash may increase agency costs and lower firm performance. The purpose of this study is to examine the relationship between corporate governance, cash holdings, and firm performance. Five thousand four hundred twenty observations were conducted, and a balanced panel data analysis was performed. The results indicate that corporate governance has a significant impact on cash holdings, corporate governance has a significant impact on firm performance, and cash holding has a significant impact on a firm's performance. The findings of this study do not show any evidence to support the agency and free cash flow theories among non-financial Malaysian firms listed on Bursa Malaysia. Thus, this study contributes to the finance and accounting literature by gaining a better understanding of firm performance indicators in Malaysia, specifically.

Accounting Conservatism and Corporate Governance: Firm-Level Evidence From Turkey

In this chapter, the impacts of corporate governance mechanisms on accounting conservatism are examined by using a sample that includes 85 non-financial firms quoted in Borsa Istanbul during the years of 2013 to 2018. The results of empirical analysis indicate that board size, board independency, institutional ownership, and firm size are positively related with accounting conservatism. However, leverage is negatively related with accounting conservatism, while there is no statistically significant association between CEO duality and accounting conservatism. This chapter contributes to limited literature on the association between accounting conservatism practices and corporate governance in the emerging market.

Bi-Level Programming for Earning Management in Imprecise and Random Environments

Organizations striving in today's environment of active technological and business transformations are confronted with the difficulties of “twofoldness,” that is, performing efficiently in the present while innovating effectively for the future. Administrators inside these organizations not only have to concentrate on the business benefit and profitability of each of their authorized commodities and services but must also guarantee their ability to introduce into next-generation contributions that output properties that will maintain and even enhance their renewed global competitiveness. The surprisingly fast breakdown of so many probably great companies over the last decade gives an extensive declaration to the consequence of accomplishing this dualism. In this chapter, to deal with this dualism, the authors consider a fuzzy stochastic bi-level programming problem in the mathematical models. The fuzziness and randomness concept has been taken care of by the fuzzy random variable as the parameter of the bi-level programming problem. A two-stage approach has been defined to solve the problem.