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This paper aims to investigate the links between accounting values in Chinese listed companies’ balance sheets and the exposure of their fraudulent activities.

Every balance sheet account is proposed to be a potential vehicle to manipulate financial statements.

Other receivables, inventories, prepaid expenses, employee benefits payables and long-term payables are important indicators of fraudulent financial statements. These results confirm that asset account manipulation is frequently carried out and cast doubt on earlier conclusions by researchers that inflation of liabilities is the most common source of financial statement manipulation.

Previous practices of solely scaling balance sheet values by assets are revealed to produce spurious relationships, while scaling by both assets and sales effectively detects fraudulent financial statements and provides a useful fraud prediction tool for Chinese auditors, regulators and investors.

Investor access to timely, financial resource consent information is problematic, consequently the purpose of this paper is to investigate the economic importance of New Zealand resource consent announcements to the stock exchange.

The authors apply event study methodology and cross‐sectional rank regression using a sample of resource consent announcements from 1993 to 2007.

Evidence of excess return volatility is found both on and before resource consent announcement dates. The results show that stock market reactions to resource consent announcements are positive for news of successes and negative for news of setbacks. Uncertainty associated with resource consent announcements appears to contribute to a delayed negative market response. In contrast, price reactions to announcements of resource consent success are immediate and significantly positive only when the news is concurrently disseminated via the media.

The findings imply that resource consent announcements are newsworthy and provide valuable information to the stock market regarding future regulatory compliance costs. Media dissemination is suggested to play an important role in the price‐adjustment process for news of resource consent successes. Given the increasing prominence of environmental compliance issues, the authors suggest that more informative disclosures regarding the types of consent(s) sought, the dollar value of expected compliance costs, expected time to gain consent, project investment costs and consent conditions imposed, would better assist investors to assess the economic impact of firm capital expenditures.

This study adds evidence to the literature on the role of environmental disclosures in disseminating information and reducing information asymmetry and offers suggestions to enhance the informativeness of environmental disseminations.

The purpose of this paper is to test an implication of the pecking order theory to explain capital structure decisions among Chinese listed companies during the 2005-2007 NTS Reform transition period.

The authors utilize direct proxies for information asymmetry based on microstructure models including Probability of the arrival of informed trades (PIN), Adverse selection component of the bid-ask spread (λ), Illiquidity ratio (ILLIQ) and liquidity ratio, and Information asymmetry index (InfoAsy) to examine their relation with firms’ debt financing.

Consistent with the prediction of Pecking Order Theory, the authors find that companies for which stock investors are challenged with more severe informational disadvantages are associated with higher degree of leverage use.

The study provides a more direct test on the positive relation between information asymmetry and financial leverage of Chinese firms. In contrast to previous findings by Chen (2004), the results suggest that capital structure choices among Chinese firms progressively conform to conventional finance theories (e.g. Pecking Order Theory) with the decline of non-tradable shares.

Focuses on street vending in Chicago, in the USA, taking a historical perspective. Shows how it was used to alleviate unemployment in the volatile progressive era but then became mired in complaints about corruption and vice. Uses a case study of an entrepreneurial Mexican family and highlights the wisdom of earlier days by showing how street vending offers a series of choices that are different from the choices made by larger forms only in that they are more accessible to the poor.

Purpose – This research examines the effects of gender, race, human capital, work conditions, and organizational characteristics on employees’ current supervisory status at work, and their perceptions of their future promotability.

Methodology – Data are drawn from the salaried employees of The National Study of the Changing Workforce in 2002, a nationally representative sample of all U.S. workers. Employees are compared by race and gender using correlation coefficients, t-tests, and multiple regression.

Findings – In contrast to earlier research, in 2002 non-white women are as likely as white women and non-white men to have attained supervisory status at work. There also is no gender or race effect on employees’ perception of their future promotional opportunity.

Workers who are supervisors, both white and non-white, are more likely than non-supervisors to perceive that they have future promotional opportunity. Having a work context that is supportive, and having supportive coworkers and a supportive supervisor, leads to the perception of greater chances to continue to move up in one's company, as does having greater job demands and union membership. On the contrary, work/family spillover, having a supervisor of the same race, and perceiving racial discrimination at the workplace leads to perception of less chance to continue to move up.

Research limitations – Employees’ actual job titles are not known except that supervising others is a major part of their job.

Practical implications – Many of the variables shown to be related to supervisory status and promotability suggest directions for the restructuring of workplaces to provide more supportive and less biased environments.

This paper reports preliminary findings about how households organize street vending businesses in response to varying sources and degrees of uncertainty. The thesis is that households organize themselves in different ways in response to different types of uncertainty associated with 1) earning different types of income and 2) differences as well as changes in intra‐household relationships. The important findings are twofold: first, that household members earn income from both “formal” and “informal” sources BOTH sequentially and simultaneously. The second finding is that people coordinate the efforts of household members with respect to (un)certainty to keep income flowing from the income‐earning activities the members are practicing. I review some empirical work on the informal economy and follow this discussion with data from Chicago's Maxwell Street Market.