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This paper aims to examine whether firms engage in earnings management immediately after experiencing a downgrade in their credit rating.

This paper uses fixed-effects regression models to examine real- and accrual-based earnings management after firms experience a downgrade in their credit rating.

Inconsistent with prior studies where firms are reported to opportunistically increase their earnings prior to a credit rating event, this paper finds that firms use income-decreasing earnings management after their ratings are downgraded. This paper also finds that firms downgraded to below the investment grade rating not only significantly reduce both abnormal cash flows and discretionary accruals but also report larger asset impairments, suggesting that these firms exploit the rating downgrade to employ a big bath accounting.

The results of this paper have practical implications for investors fixating on firm earnings after a credit rating downgrade, for shareholders of downgraded firms and regulators such as credit rating agencies.

The findings of this study contribute to the thin literature on earnings management after changes in credit rating by shedding lights on earnings management after a rating downgrade and complement the literature on the accounting choice of financially distressed firms. The empirical evidence documented in this study suggests that the occurrence of income-decreasing earnings management is not limited to only after a sovereign country rating downgrade as documented in a prior study but also occurs after a rating downgrade not associated with this event.

The paper aims to investigate corporate risk-taking following changes in firms' credit ratings (CR) and the mechanisms the firms use in implementing the risk-taking.

The paper employs fixed-effect regression models to examine risk-taking behaviour after firms experience changes in CR after their ratings are downgraded to the lower edge of the investment grade rating (i.e. BBB-) and after their CRs are downgraded below the investment rating.

The paper finds that, whilst in general, changes in CR are negatively associated with post-event risk-taking, firms downgraded to BBB- do not increase their risk-taking. Only when firms are rated below this grade, firms significantly increase their risk-taking, suggesting that the association between downgrades in CR and firm risk-taking following the event is not linear. Further analysis suggests that these downgraded firms do not increase research and development (R&D) expenses or capital expenditures but employ long-term debt as their risk-taking mechanism.

The findings of the paper have practical implications for investors considering investing in downgraded-rating firms to shareholders of such firms and especially to those overseeing the firms' risk-taking policies.

The study fills the gap in the literature by providing empirical evidence on corporate risk-taking after changes in CR and also contributes to the optimal debt-maturity choice literature.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the operating and stock performance of subsidiaries prior to a parent–subsidiary merger and examine whether minority shareholders benefit from such a merger.

This paper employs a refined performance-adjusted discretionary accrual model as a measure for earnings management prior to parent–subsidiary mergers.

This paper finds evidence supporting the notion that subsidiaries’ operating performance is manipulated downward prior to parent–subsidiary mergers, but the incentive to expropriate minority shareholders depends on a parent’s percentage ownership of its subsidiary prior to the merger.

The findings of this paper have practical implications for investors and especially for policy makers to regulate this type of mergers.

This study contributes to the thin literature on parent–subsidiary mergers by providing empirical evidence that parent companies can expropriate their minority shareholders’ wealth in these mergers. This finding is consistent with the minority expropriation hypothesis, which contradicts the findings in prior studies on this unique type of mergers.

The purpose of this paper is to examine whether managers deliberately use accruals to convey information regarding firm future profitability.

The paper uses contemporaneous earnings and dividend increase announcements in New Zealand as the research setting. This setting reduces the possibility of opportunistic income smoothing by managers and, hence, increases the validity of the inference on the accrual signaling hypothesis. The paper employs a refined accrual model that controls the performance effects in estimating the part of accruals subject to managerial discretion.

The paper finds evidence consistent with managers using both accruals and changes in dividends to communicate private information regarding firm future profitability to the market. In particular, dividend‐increasing firms are observed to report positive accruals that are correlated with the positive market reaction to dividend increase announcements and future profitability. These findings are robust to performance, growth, and post‐earnings announcement drift effects.

This paper provides evidence that managers use accruals in conjunction with a corporate event to convey their private information regarding firm profitability. The results of the study are expected to shed more light on signaling aspects of accruals and to some degree alleviate the negative perception of managerial discretions over accruals vastly documented in the earnings management literature. This will hopefully add supporting evidence to the signaling hypothesis of accruals, which has so far received limited attention in the literature.

The purpose of this paper is to extend the literature on earnings management by examining whether stock dividends provide management with an incentive to manipulate earnings.

This paper employs a refined accrual model that controls the performance effects in estimating the part of accruals subject to managerial discretion.

Stock dividend issuing firms increase accruals substantially in the issue year followed by poor earnings and stock price performance in the subsequent year. More importantly, discretionary accruals of stock dividend issuing firms are negatively correlated with the declines in both future earnings and abnormal stock returns.

This paper examines the hypothesis that stock dividend firms engage in earnings management.

This paper investigates the presence of the accrual and the cash flow anomalies in the New Zealand stock market for the period of 1987 to 2003. We observe insignificant evidence of the accrual anomaly but find strong evidence of the presence of the cash flow anomaly. However, from 1987 to 1992 – a period before the introduction of the Companies and the Financial Reporting Acts 1993 – the presence of the accrual anomaly was statistically significant suggesting that the introduction of the FRA had a significant impact on the occurrence of the anomaly. We observe further that firms with high discretionary accruals experience significant negative future stock returns. This evidence is consistent with the notion that managers of these firms engage in earnings management.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the impact of firm-level corporate governance practices on the riskiness of a firm's stock returns.

The authors constructed an index of governance quality incorporating best practices stipulated by regulators. The authors employed regression analysis.

The empirical evidence, using an index of corporate governance, shows that well-governed New Zealand firms experience lower levels of risk, ceteris paribus. In particular, the results indicate that corporate governance aspects such as board composition, shareholder rights, and disclosure practices are associated with lower levels of risk.

A limitation of the study is that the corporate governance index constructed is somewhat arbitrary and due to limitation of data availability the authors may have excluded some factors such as share trading policy of directors and policies regarding provision of non-auditing services by auditors. The research supports the view that institutional context could have an impact on governance outcomes. The work has three implications for managers, investors, and policy makers. First, the results imply that well-governed firms have lower idiosyncratic risk and that this reduction is most likely due to the reduction in agency costs and information risk. Second, in the absence of features like an active corporate control market and stock option based managerial compensation, managers have little incentives to take on risky projects that increase firm value. Third, the results suggest that the managers of well-governed firms are not more risk averse with respect to investment decisions compared to poorly governed firms.

The work has practical implications for managers, investors, and policy makers. Well-governed firms face lower variability in stock returns compared to poorly governed firms. Firms that have independent boards that protect its shareholders’ rights and disclose its governance-related policies experience lower firm-level risk, other things being equal.

This study is the first one to examine the impact of a composite measure of corporate governance quality on stock return variability in a non-US setting. The results suggest that firms can use specific corporate governance provisions to mitigate firm-level risk. The findings of the paper are therefore relevant and useful to corporate managers, investors, and policy makers.

In this paper, we investigate the New Zealand stock market reactions to both on-market and off-market share repurchase programmes for the period 1995–2004. Share repurchases have become more frequent in New Zealand in recent years, though the size and the number of repurchases are still small by international standards. The main reason appears to be the presence of the dividend imputation system which diminishes the tax consequences of cash dividends compared to capital gains. On the whole, we observe that the market reacts positively and significantly to the share repurchase announcements. The magnitude of average abnormal returns for the on- and the off-market repurchases on the announcement day are 3.25 and 3.12% respectively. We further observe the reasons companies undertake stock repurchase are consistent with the investment and free cash flows agency hypotheses.