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Corrosion data of the widely used silver brazing alloys (BAg‐1 and BAg‐3) of the American Welding Society’s (AWS) specification are scant in literature. Deals with the study of the corrosion behaviour of these alloys in different environments with particular emphasis on the industrial and marine atmospheres.

Commercial Zn‐Al alloys are susceptible to Intergranular Corrosion (IGC) restricting their widespread use for various applications. In this paper the IGC behaviour of two important foundry alloys namely Zn‐8Al and Zn‐12Al has been studied through microstructural observations with a view to improving the resistance to intergranular attack. It has been shown that a special flux containing boric oxide along with fluoride and chloride salts employed during the preparation of the alloys significantly improves the resistance to intergranular attack.

Prior literature has found that as uncertainty in a firms information environment increases, optimism increases in equity analysts’ earnings forecasts. The studies suggest an economic incentive explanation, commonly called the management‐relations hypothesis. However, there is conflicting evidence that managers would prefer pessimistic forecasts and encourage analysts to “walk‐down” their forecasts to prevent negative earnings surprises. To test these contradictory findings, this study uses an experimental setting to remove economic incentives from the analyst’s decision process and isolate the cause of observed bias in analysts’ reports. The results of the experiment show that an increase in the perceived uncertainty of the forecasting task results in significantly lower relative optimism in analysts’ earnings forecasts. This finding is consistent with a negativity hypothesis and the managementrelations hypothesis extolled in the empirical research. The findings also show that relative forecast optimism bias is positively related to the level of analysts’ buy/sell recommendations consistent with more recent findings that suggest that analysts use motivated reasoning (the tendency to process information in a manner that supports one’s goal) in their judgments of forecasted earnings and recommendations. Together, these results suggest that analysts consider and use financial information differently depending on their decision goal.

Prior research shows that managers with lower ability release less accurate management earnings forecasts and have more earnings restatements, lower earnings persistence and lower quality accruals estimations. Yet, whether the impact of managerial ability (MA) on financial reporting can be extended to the narrative section of firms' financial disclosures needs to be theoretically and empirically examined. The authors theorize in this paper that managers with low ability opportunistically inflate the tone to increase outsiders' perceptions of their ability. The authors also examine the relation between MA and the informativeness of tone to predict future firm performance and explain investors' reaction at earnings announcement.

The authors collect 24,000 earnings press releases of 1,149 distinct firms between 2004 and 2013. Content analysis is used to proxy the tone of the disclosures. The authors use the score developed by Demerjian et al. (2012) to measure MA. The authors then employ panel data regressions to examine the impact of MA on disclosure tone.

The authors find that low-ability managers inflate the disclosure tone to positively influence labor market's perceptions about their ability. This effect is magnified for younger and shorter-tenured managers, for firms with more intense monitoring and during bear markets. The authors also find that the tone of earnings press releases of low-ability managers results in a lower stock price reaction. Supplementary analyses show that the results do not only hold for the tone, but also can be extended to other linguistic features such as the numerical intensity and the readability of earnings press releases. The results are robust to alternative library specifications and other corporate disclosures such as CEO letters to shareholders or 10-K filings.

The paper shows that managers worry about how firm performance influences the labor market assessment of their ability. In particular, the authors find that managers of low ability are willing to opportunistically manipulate the content of corporate disclosures to improve this perception and build their reputation.

The authors contribute by providing theoretical and empirical evidence on how managers attempt to steer assessments of their ability by manipulating corporate disclosures. Consistent with prior business research suggesting that one's ability is a key feature that affects managers' propensity to engage in ethical practices, such as tax avoidance or manipulation of financial information, this study shows that less able managers tend to inflate the tone of the earnings announcements and that this ability-driven bias is likely to be magnified by career concerns.

This paper examines how target costing decisions can be impacted by product and production interdependencies.

Numerical examples are used to investigate the effect that product and production interdependencies have on target costing decisions. Mixed integer programming and simulation are used to model the interrelationships between a product’s cost reduction effort and related decisions such as product mix, pricing, and capacity acquisition. Product and production interdependencies are introduced by evaluating a product with multiple price and demand options, capacity is acquired in large discrete quantities, and resources have economies of scale. Analyses of choices made with and without considering product and production interdependencies are used to evaluate their effects on target costing decisions.

A product’s cost reduction effort cannot be determined independently of other production-related choices, such as product mix, capacity, and price, in the presence of product and production interdependencies.

The findings of this paper underscore the need for additional research to understand the conditions that impair target costing decisions and the economic consequences of suboptimal decisions.

Rather than assessing target costing decisions at the individual product level, these decisions must be evaluated at the portfolio level of the firm’s operations.

Suboptimal target costing decisions impact the products and product mix that the firm chooses to offer, which affects the ability of organizations to effectively achieve their strategic goals.

This paper identifies new limitations to target costing that can help managers understand the technique better and lead to improved target costing decisions.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate what and how intellectual capital information (ICI) conveyed through analyst reports varies by the type of stock recommendation. It draws on the theory of impression management.

Content analysis is used to investigate ICI in the full text of sell‐side analysts’ initiating coverage reports. It categorises ICI by type and three qualitative characteristics: evidence; time orientation; and news‐tenor. It explores how the extent, types and qualitative characteristics of ICI found in analyst reports vary by the type of stock recommendation accompanying the analyst report.

Given the conflicting interests facing analysts and relative amenability of ICI, it was found that analysts use ICI to manage perceptions. In particular, analysts attempt to use ICI in their reports to subdue the pessimism associated with an unfavourable recommendation, increase credibility of favourable recommendations and distinguish sell from hold recommendations.

The paper contributes to the literature on impression management by extending its application to the study of sell‐side analysts’ decision processes and it alerts future researchers to the wider role played by ICI beyond its use in generation of forecasts and valuations. The paper's findings have implications for consumers of analyst reports, as the level of negativity/positivity of forecasts and recommendations may be altered as a result of the semantics associated with ICI.

This paper explores analysts’ use of ICI conditional on the type of stock recommendation accompanying the report. Findings are explained using the theory of impression management.

The purpose of this paper is to describe a methodology that enables the generation of valid and reliable inferences on what and how intellectual capital (IC) information is communicated by sell‐side analysts in their research reports.

The method described in this paper involves content‐analysing initiating coverage analyst reports using a four‐dimensional IC coding framework and a detailed coding instrument, which is founded in the literature and indigenous to analyst reports. The paper explicates methodological decisions associated with content analysis: selecting the appropriate sampling unit; recording unit and measurement unit; developing the categorisation scheme and coding instrument; the need for test coding; the approach to data collection; and assessment of reliability and validity.

The methodology described is applied to a sample of analyst reports to illustrate inferences that can be drawn on what and how IC information is communicated in analyst reports.

Various practical issues arising in the application of content analysis method are discussed and a methodology for investigating IC communications by sell‐side analysts is described in this paper. This knowledge can be useful to future researchers conducting content‐analytic studies involving analyst reports in general, and IC communications in analyst reports in particular.

This paper extends the methodology developed previously to examine IC information in analyst reports. Although inspired and heavily influenced by these works, the methodology presented in this paper differs from theirs on several fronts. The paper introduces an alternative methodological paradigm to the study of analyst reports by emphasising them as a communication medium through which sell‐side analysts may pursue an agenda of their own. This is contrasted with the view held by several prior researchers that analyst reports just provide a record of analysts' thought processes.

Fudenberg and Tirole (1995) argue that concern about job security creates an incentive for managers to smooth earnings. Consistent with their model, Defond and Park (1997) show that managers smooth earnings in consideration of both current and future relative performance. To provide a more direct evidence of anticipating smoothing and job security, we hypothesize that the extent of income smoothing will vary with managers' job security concerns as proxied by the level of the investment opportunity set or growth opportunities. Our results confirmed our predictions.

Research in customer engagement (CE) has gained momentum in the last decade, thanks to its growing popularity among scholars and practitioners. The Marketing Science Institute (MSI), for instance, has been continually listing CE as part of its Tier I research priorities since 2010. CE scholars have also studied the construct in the international marketing context. Hofstede's characterization of cultures as either individualist or collectivist helped scholars explain the need for different CE strategies across countries, and the domain seems to be evolving ever since. The ever-growing interest of CE scholars in the international market and cross-cultural scenarios requires a comprehensive and scientific review of the literature. Using bibliometric analysis, this study fills this critical gap by mapping the intellectual structure of CE research in the context of international marketing and provides future research directions to scholars in this domain.

The authors have used VOSviewer and Biblioshiny software packages to conduct a bibliometric analysis of 109 articles in the domain.

The major findings include the most influential countries, journals, articles and authors, the different research streams and their development and the future research directions in the domain. When CE is considered in an international marketing context, four broad themes emerged. The first theme is about differences in customer engagement behaviors across cultures. The second theme is about the development of CE and related constructs. The third theme relates to how brands have used CE and CBE (customer brand engagement) across different international contexts. The fourth theme is all about the conceptual and methodological support for the study of CE.

This study is a novel attempt at providing a comprehensive bibliometric analysis of CE research in the international marketing context, using a combination of VOSviewer and Biblioshiny software packages.