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This paper aims to provide evidence that will inform the convergence debate regarding accounting standards. The authors assess the ability of impairment reversals allowed under International Accounting Standard 36 but disallowed by the Financial Accounting Standards Board to provide useful information about a company.

The authors use a sample of 182 Malaysian firms that reversed impairment charges and a matched sample of firms which chose not to reverse their impairments. Further analysis examines if reversing an impairment charge is associated with motivations for and evidence of earnings management.

The authors find no evidence that the reversal of an impairment charge marks a company out as managing contemporaneous earnings. However, they document evidence that firms with high levels of abnormal accruals and weak corporate governance avoid earnings decline by reversing previously recognized impairments. In addition, companies that have engaged in big baths as evidenced by high accumulated impairment balances and prior changes in top management, use impairment reversals to avoid earnings declines.

The results of this study support both the informative and opportunistic hypotheses of impairment reversal reporting using Financial Reporting Standard 136.

The results also demonstrate how companies that use impairment reversals opportunistically can be identified.

The results support IASB’s approach to the reversal of impairments. They also provide novel evidence as to how companies exploit a cookie-jar reserve created by a prior big bath opportunistically.

The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the impact of corporate governance reforms in Italy.

The authors argue that the effectiveness of corporate governance can best be assessed with reference to the choices made by management or controlling shareholders. They use the curtailment of earnings management as a desirable and measureable outcome of good corporate governance to assess Italy’s progress since the 1990s. The UK is used as a reference point because it is a European Union (EU) economy of comparable size and there is evidence that its firms managed earnings to a much lesser extent than their counterparts in Italy in the 1990s. A matched sample of UK and Italian firms was used for the empirical analysis.

It was found that in contrast to the situation in the 1990s, firms in Italy do not manage earnings to a greater extent than their UK counterparts after the corporate governance reforms. In addition, firm-level governance has a greater effect on earnings management in Italy than in the UK. The authors attribute this to firm-level governance compensating for deficiencies in national institutions.

The restriction of earnings management is just one positive consequence of good governance. Other positive outcomes require to be studied to form a complete picture of the impact of governance reforms in Italy.

This paper is the first to use an outcome-driven approach to evaluate the impact of governance reforms.

The purpose of this paper is to define and describe digital curation, an emerging field of theory and practice in the information professions that embraces digital preservation, data curation, and management of information assets over their lifecycle. It dissects key issues and debates in the area while arguing that digital curation is a vital strategy for dealing with the so-called data deluge.

This paper explores digital curation’s potential to provide an improved return on investment in data work.

A vital counterweight to the problem of data loss, digital curation also adds value to trusted data assets for current and future use. This paper unpacks data, the research enterprise, the roles and responsibilities of digital curation professionals, the data lifecycle, metadata, sharing and reuse, scholarly communication (cyberscholarship, publication and citation, and rights), infrastructure (archives, centers, libraries, and institutional repositories), and overarching issues (standards, governance and policy, planning and data management plans, risk management, evaluation, and metrics, sustainability, and outreach).

A critical discussion that focusses on North America and the UK, this paper synthesizes previous findings and conclusions in the area of digital curation. It has value for digital curation professionals and researchers as well as students in library and information science who may deal with data in the future. This paper helps potential stakeholders understand the intellectual and practical framework and the importance of digital curation in adding value to scholarly (science, social science, and humanities) and other types of data. This paper suggests the need for further empirical research, not only in exploring the actual sharing and reuse practices of various sectors, disciplines, and domains, but also in considering the the data lifecycle, the potential role of archivists, funding and sustainability, outreach and awareness-raising, and metrics.

Researchers suspect that the overvaluation of equity issuing acquirers is a major cause of their subsequent post-event underperformance. Definitive conclusions regarding this overpricing hypothesis have not been possible since indicators of overpricing such as the book-to-market ratio and subsequent underperformance are open to alternative interpretations. The purpose of this paper is to corroborate or refute overvaluation as a driver of equity issuing acquirers’ subsequent underperformance.

The literature has linked overvaluation of acquirers to over-optimistic expectations. The authors use analysts’ earnings forecasts to reflect the market's expectations. Over-optimism is indicated by subsequent earnings disappointments. The authors examine the relation between acquirers’ choice of payment method and their tendency to report disappointing earnings. The authors also examine the effect of including a more direct measure of over-optimism in a model to explain the long-run post-event buy-and-hold-abnormal returns of acquirers.

The post-acquisition earnings of equity issuing acquirers disappoint more often than those of acquirers employing alternative financing methods. This relationship is confined to glamour acquirers. The ability of financing method to predict long-run post-acquisition performance is subsumed when direct measures of optimism are included in a model explaining long-run post-acquisition performance. This result is robust to controls for overpayment and other potential explanations of post-acquisition underperformance.

Acquirers’ management exploit their information advantage to exchange overvalued equity for the assets of the target company in accordance with Loughran and Ritter's (2000) behavioural timing hypothesis.

The study provides new and unambiguous evidence that equity-issuing acquirers are optimistically priced at the time of acquisition.

This paper aims to study the impact of a significant negative shock (the reporting of an initial loss) on the stickiness of corporate governance. This paper examines whether corporate governance changes in response to the reporting of an initial loss and also whether ex ante corporate governance weakness impacts on the propensity for change.

The study uses three years of corporate governance information spanning the report of an initial loss for companies listed on the UK Stock Exchange. An industry- and size-matched control sample is used in a difference-in-difference analysis to isolate the impact of the loss from underlying changes in governance.

The results indicate that an initial loss precipitates an improvement in corporate governance and that this improvement is significantly more pronounced in those companies which displayed either weak or extreme governance before the loss. There is also evidence that the improvement in corporate governance begins before the loss is actually reported.

This study focuses on a three-year period in the UK only and so is a limitation of the research. Future research could be based on the findings from other jurisdictions or from using other conditioning variables.

This study contributes to the stream of research that examines negative shocks, and losses in particular, as an event likely to precipitate firm-level changes in corporate governance and offers insights into the reasons for firm-level corporate governance improvements. It demonstrates that, notwithstanding the recommendations of the Combined Code, firms tend to not make improvements without the impetus and need to do so, i.e. corporate governance is sticky.

The primary purpose of this paper is to test the prediction that overpricing drives merger waves.

The authors supplement proxies of overpricing from the existing literature such as subsequent under‐performance, the form of consideration/financing and low Book‐to‐Market ratios with an approach based on analysts' earnings forecasts. The authors maintain that over‐pricing is associated with relatively optimistically biased forecasts and use a metric based on subsequent earnings disappointments to represent mispricing.

It is reported that acquirers in hot markets are overpriced relative to acquirers in cold markets on almost all measures of over‐pricing thus supporting the behavioural theory. However, having controlled for optimistically biased expectations the long‐run BHARs to acquisitions in hot markets exceed those of acquisitions made in cold markets. These results therefore support the neoclassical theory's contention that post‐acquisition returns in merger waves are better than the unobserved alternative without the acquisition. The authors infer that neither the neoclassical nor behavioural theory on its own can provide a complete description of merger waves.

The authors exploit earnings forecasts to establish evidence of overpricing in a manner that is novel to the M&A literature. It is found that financing/consideration is significant in explaining subsequent under‐performance only in hot markets. This result is unaffected by controls for mispricing. The authors infer that the use of equity financing is driven by both behavioural timing and also by a desire to share any shortfall due to the increased potential for overpayment in hot markets.

The extent to which health service general managers set goals similar to those set by their commercial counterparts is explored. The areas in which goals are set ‐ and at what organisational levels ‐ are analysed from the survey results.

While existing UK studies conduct a cross‐sectional analysis, this paper seeks to argue that the ratio of Executive Directors to non‐executive director (NED) on the boards of UK firms, coupled with a gradual appointment process, motivated by firms’ desire to comply with the recommendations of the Cadbury report, has the potential to produce a temporal effect.

Data for this study were collected from January 1990 to May 2000.

The empirical analysis suggests that a temporal pattern does exist. Two distinct periods were identified. In the initial period, prior to March 1998 the market viewed NED appointments favourably. After March 1998 NED appointments were no longer significant economic events. Overall, it appears that the market viewed the appointment of NEDs to the boards of FTSE 350 firms favourably; suggesting that such appointees were viewed as a significant input by firms as they attempted to achieve an optimal corporate governance mix.

This paper contributes to the small body of literature on the market's perception of the value of non‐executive, outside, director appointments to FTSE‐350 firms from 1990 to 2000.

This paper focuses on bank audit committees and examines whether audit committee members who are former auditors are associated with the acquisition of audit and non-audit services from their former employers.

The study empirically examines a sample of large banks that are included in the S&P Composite 1500.

The paper reports significantly lower audit fees and a higher proportion of non-audit fees to total fees when the audit committee chair is an alumnus of the incumbent audit firm. Moreover, additional analysis reveals that these findings are stronger for banks with more earnings management.

Overall, the findings indicate that audit firms might consider banks using their alumni as audit committee chairs to be less risky or easier to audit, thus requiring relatively less effort from the auditors. The reduced effort required to audit clients with audit firm alumni on their audit committees then has the effect of reducing the audit fees charged. Alternatively, their auditing experience and cognitive proximity might influence the assessment of the need for auditing or the ability to negotiate lower audit fees on the part of audit firm alumni.

This paper provides empirical evidence of the association between audit firm alumni in influential positions on an audit committee and fees paid to those audit firms in the banking industry. The findings contribute to the literature by suggesting that banks with affiliated former auditors chairing their audit committees not only have significantly lower audit fees but also a higher proportion is spent on non-audit services.