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Financial reporting standards on foreign currency translation in many countries such as New Zealand, US, Australia, and Canada and the international standard issued by the International Accounting Standards Committee require the classification of foreign operations for translation purposes into two mutually exclusive types: integrated or independent. This classification determines the translation method. In judging whether a foreign operation is either integrated or independent, the accounting standard requires the evaluation of five qualitative factors. The standard neither describes the judgement process nor identifies the relative importance of the determining factors. It has been asserted that this lack of clarity may yield dissimilar results for firms whose circumstances are similar and consequently may reduce the comparability of financial statements across firms. Using a repeated measures design, this paper examines the judgement of preparers of financial statements (financial controllers) in determining the designation of foreign operations for translation purposes. The results indicate that the relative importance of the determining factors is about equal. No support is found for the assertion that the use of qualitative factors in accounting standards results in dissimilar judgements (lack of consensus) across respondents. Further, the results show that the subjects demonstrated consistency and self‐insight in their judgements. The results also indicate that the judgements of respondents are not biased toward either classification of foreign operation. This suggests that the observed bias may be motivated by economic factors rather than the outcome of using the qualitative cues in the accounting standard. When the respondents were debriefed, several of them identified ‘managerial independence’ as another determining factor that has not been included in the standard.

Recent research has focused on the influence of the political party of the US President on stock indices. This current paper extends this area of research by including the influence of the political party that holds the majority in Congress into the research design. The results do not support the hypothesis that there is a statistically significant relationship between the political party of the president and the return on the stock index. However, the political party with the majority in Congress is significantly related to the return on the index. The returns during Republican controlled Congresses are higher than returns during Democrat controlled Congresses.

In a recent study, Liano, Liano and Manakyan (1999) conclude that the pattern of day‐of‐the‐week effects in stock indices differs between Democratic administrations and Republican administrations. Specifically, the weekend effect is more pronounced during Republican administrations. This paper re‐examines this issue. It incorporates into the analysis the implications of Connolly's (1989) findings that the weekend effect has disappeared since 1975. We confirm Connolly's results. However, contrary to Liano et al. (1999), we conclude that day‐of‐the‐week effects are not significantly moderated by the political administration.

This paper provides a meta‐analysis of the Hirshleifer and Shumway's results on the casual influence of daily cloud cover on stock index returns for 26 international stock exchanges. It aims to test whether these results are influenced by the location of the stock exchange and the development of the economy.

A conventional meta‐analytic procedure is used to synthesise the data. The effect size, of the influence of cloud cover on stock returns, is measured by the Fisher Z correlation coefficient. This is obtained from the t‐statistic of the slope coefficient reported in the regression for each country. Two study characteristics are used to differentiate between the 26 stock exchanges. These are the latitude of the city and the per capita Gross Domestic Product of the country.

The influence of cloud cover on stock returns becomes more negative as latitude increases and more negative as per capita Gross Domestic Product increases. A cloud cover effect does not exist at the equator.

The implication is that trading rules based on cloud cover will be more profitable at higher latitudes.

Meta‐analyses are infrequently used in the Finance literature. This paper illustrates their utility.