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The purpose of this paper is to examine the dividend policy for firms listed on the Taiwan Stock Exchange. The results are consistent with the prediction of the catering theory in that managers choose a dividend policy to cater to the demand of investors.

Logistic regressions are used to test the catering theory hypothesis.

The results find that the firms distribute more stock dividends than other types of dividends when the dividend premium (DP) for stock dividends is positive. In contrast, firms shift from stock dividends to other types of dividends such as mixed dividends and cash dividends when the DP for stock dividends is negative.

The marginal contribution of this paper is that the firms change their dividend policy via DP to cater to the demand of investors.

This study focused on analysing the effect of acquisition characteristics on post‐acquisition operating performance for 83 bids consisting of 83 public listed bidders acquiring 80 private, 2 public listed and 1 non‐public listed targets in Malaysia during the period 1988–1992. The specific bid characteristics analysed are business relatedness, management turnover, the relative size of targets to bidders, the method of payment offered and board of directors' ownership structure. Since the specific feature of the current sample is that it consists mainly of privately owned targets, the characteristics of disciplinary bids found in acquisitions of public listed targets were not expected in agreed bids between the bidders and targets in this study. The results indicate that the target directors' turnover and the directors' share ownership do not have a significant effect on the post‐acquisition performance. Rather it appears that, if anything, retention of existing management is more likely to lead to performance improvement. Further analysis shows that replacement of target management has no impact on post‐acquisition performance regardless of the relatedness line of business. The latter findings reinforce the unique characteristics of the data set used in the current analysis of acquisitions of privately owned Malaysian companies in which unique skills of previous directors may often be retained post‐acquisition regardless of the business relatedness. The study also provides evidence that acquisitions of highly related business between target and acquiring firm, large relative size of target to bidders and payment for the acquisition by shares have a significant positive impact on post‐acquisition control‐adjusted performance. However, highly related business between target and bidder and payment by shares are the only significant acquisition characteristics that have a significant positive impact on the post‐acquisition control‐adjusted performance when multiple regression is used.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the effect of financial factors on firms’ financial and tax reporting decisions. Firms often face the difficulties of accomplishing both financial and reporting goals. The extent to which reporting they put more value depends on the differential weighting of firms’ financial reporting and tax costs. The authors incorporate various financial factors as a source of cross-sectional differences in the weighing of both financial reporting and tax costs.

To examine firms’ decisions when fulfilling both the purposes of financial and tax reporting is difficult, the authors use a large set of firms in Korea, where book-tax conformity is high and aggressive tax shelters are restricted. The authors develop a new measure that can specify firms’ decision making between financial and tax reporting by considering both earnings management and tax avoidance.

The findings show that debt ratio affects firms’ financial and tax reporting decisions non-monotonically depending on the level of the debt ratio. The authors also find that firms with more long-term debt financing are more likely to be aggressive in financial reporting, while firms with higher financing deficit or better access to the capital market are more likely to be aggressive in tax reporting.

Thus, the findings provide more compelling evidence of firms’ decision making between two conflicting strategies, particularly when fulfilling both the purposes of financial and tax reporting is difficult. The authors expect that the results provide practical implications to standard setters, auditors and financial statement users who are interested in the ongoing debate over book-tax tradeoffs.

This paper fulfills an identified need to study how firms’ decision making between two conflicting reporting strategies are affected by the various financial factors, which are closely linked to a firm’s financial reporting and tax costs.

This paper aims to develop hedging strategies using both futures and forward contracts and issuing risky debt when financially constrained firms are forced to operate in long horizon.

The authors present a model for developing hedging strategies using both futures and forward contracts and issuing risky debt. A theoretical model employing stochastic differential equations for forward hedging is illustrated with a numerical example over parameter values consistent with the literature.

A financially constrained firm with limited cash balance must hedge its liquidity with both future and forward contracts and issue risky debt to support its long-term operations. The firm can issue a minimal amount of risky debt by adding forward contracts into hedging and can increase its value higher than that when hedging with only futures contracts. We show numerically that hedging with both futures and forward contracts allows the firm to issue minimal risky debt in increasing its firm value.

When Metallgesellschaft nearly collapsed in 1993, it offered long-term forward contracts to its customers and attempted to hedge its risk by rolling over series of short-term futures contract. It created the situation of inherent mismatch in maturity structure. A financially constrained firm operating in a long horizon appears to commit its liquidity as long-term forward contracts, which cannot be fully hedged with series of futures contacts. The firm should hedge its liquidity with both futures and forward contracts and avoid liquidation with deadweight costs in its long-term operation.

This is the first study examining hedging strategies with both futures and forward contracts.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the roles of earnings and book value (BV) in equity valuation.

The authors apply model’s explanatory power to analyze the roles of accounting data and test the hypotheses empirically with a sample of Chinese listed companies between 2004 and 2010.

The authors find that impact of accounting data on equity value is also dependent on profitability, but the behavior is non-monotonic. In the intermediate-profitability range, explanatory power of both earnings capitalization model and balance sheet model reach the peak, there are no significant differences between them. In the low-profitability range (small or negative profitability), explanatory power of balance sheet model is larger than earnings capitalization model. In the high-profitability range, explanatory power of balance sheet model is less than earnings capitalization model.

The results support that the role of BV is more stable in equity valuation. Moreover, this outcome provides reference for improving existing valuation model and setting accounting standard, and provides some empirical evidence for the practical application of BV in equity valuation.

Existing studies treat earnings as main variable of equity valuation, and BV is only added as a supplement. This paper compares roles of accounting earnings and BV in equity valuation, especially investigates the influence of BV in equity valuation, and fills up the deficiency in the related literature.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the effect of ownership concentration on CEO compensation and firm performance relationship in New Zealand.

The paper applies regression analysis to data from New Zealand listed companies from 2001 to 2005.

The study finds a non‐linear effect of ownership concentration on CEO compensation‐firm performance relationship, that is CEO compensation is negatively (positively) related to firm performance in firms with high (low) concentrated ownership structure respectively.

Results provide evidence for the proposition that ownership concentration at a high level in New Zealand does not constrain excessive management power, but exacerbates agency problems associated with executive pay. A highly concentrated ownership structure provides potential explanation for the misalignment between CEO compensation and firm performance in New Zealand. The positive effect of a low ownership concentration level on CEO compensation‐firm performance relationship suggests that monitoring the efficiency of large shareholders works better at a low ownership concentration level.

By exploring the non‐linear interaction between two governance mechanisms – CEO compensation and ownership concentration – the findings of the study make contributions to the current compensation and ownership literature mainly in two ways: although the non‐linearity between ownership concentration and firm value has attracted extensive research interest, little attention is given to the non‐linear effect of large shareholding on the CEO compensation contract in prior studies; and, in the context of a developed country with a small financial market, there are low regulatory “drag” and virtual absence of a litigation threat to organisations, as in New Zealand. This study suggests concentrated ownership as an underlying explanation for the misalignment between CEO compensation and firm performance.

We discuss recent developments in real options theory and its applications to strategic management research, examine the potential difficulties in implementing real options in theory and practice, and propose several areas for future research. Our review shows that real options theory has provided substantial insights into investment and exit decisions as well as into the choice of investment modes. In addition, extant research studies have contributed significantly to our understanding of whether and how organizations can benefit from real options. Future research that addresses difficulties in applications will further advance both real options theory and practice in strategic management. We call for future generations of research to enhance the impact of real options as an emerging dominant conceptual lens in strategic management.

The goal of this paper is to investigate the relationship between government control and firm value in China.

Government might extract social or political benefits from a state-controlled firm, thus decreases firm value. However, government’s monitoring on firm management reduces managers’ agency problem, which increases firm value. We first build a game-theoretic model to prove the existence of optimal government control given these two roles of government, and we then employ the OLS regression method to test the theory predictions using the length of intermediate ownership chains connecting the listed state-owned enterprises to their ultimate controllers as the measure of government control.

We find that firm values first increase then decrease as government control weakens. Moreover, we find that government usually retains a stronger control over state-owned enterprises than the optimal level. In addition, we show that government control can be further weakened in firms with good corporate governance mechanisms, which serve as a substitution of government monitoring.

Our results demonstrate that government control in China is still a necessary but costly mechanism to mitigate agency costs, especially when corporate governance system is underdeveloped.

We identify the substitution effect between government control and corporate governance using a unique measure of government control.

Fears over public accounting becoming increasingly concentrated have inspired several attempts to study the relationship between competition and audit quality. These studies have yielded conflicting results without a clear reason as to why. This paper aims to propose a new approach and empirically demonstrate a non-monotonic association between competition and audit quality.

Using metropolitan statistical area level data from the USA over the period of 2000–2014, the author shows that the effect that changes in the competition will have on audit quality depends upon the current competitive state of the market.

Audit quality is at its highest level when competition is neither too high nor too low. In addition, the point of inflection at which competition turns from being helpful to harmful is influenced by the saturation of the Big 4 auditors in the market.

These findings can help explain the mixed results of the literature and provide insight into the role that regulators can play in modulating competition.

This is the first paper to document a non-monotonic relationship between competition and audit quality. By introducing and exploring the validity of a non-monotonic component in the audit quality equation, the authors can better determine, which competitive structures generate desired levels of audit quality.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the impact of ownership structure and corporate governance on corporate liquidity policy from a developing country perspective, Ghana Stock Exchange (GSE).

The authors adopt multiple regression analysis in estimating the relationship between ownership structure, corporate governance and corporate liquidity policy as well as the impact of corporate governance on insider ownership.

The authors find that foreign share ownership significantly predicts corporate cash holding on the GSE. The empirical result also portrays positive and statistically significant relationship between board size, financial leverage, firm size, profitability and corporate liquidity holding, and a negative and statistically significant relationship between board composition and corporate liquidity holding. The authors also document positive and statistically significant relationship between the various industry classifications namely manufacturing, distribution and the pharmaceutical industry and corporate cash holdings on the GSE but did not however find significant relationship between corporate governance and insider ownership on the GSE. The authors found positive relationship between Tobin's Q and inside ownership.

The main value of this paper is to analyze the relationship between ownership structure, corporate governance and corporate liquid policy from a developing country perspective.