The refinancing of PFI (Private Finance Initiative) projects represents one of the most contentious aspects of Public Private Partnerships (PPPs) in the UK. The negative publicity associated with UK PFI refinancing deals is associated with several factors, including, evidence of massive private...

The paper examines an early case of creative accounting, and how, during British industrialization, accounting was enlisted by the manufacturers’ interest to resist demands, led by the ‘Ten hours’ movement, for limiting the working day. In contrast to much of the prior literature, which...

The question of how an individual firm’s environmental performance impacts its firm risk has not been examined in any empirical UK research. Does a company that strives to attain good environmental performance decreases its market risk or is environmental performance just a disadvantageous...

The paper offers a new perspective on the management and accounting practices at this pioneering firm of the British industrial revolution. Using a historical materialist approach, it offers an alternative to the economic rationalist, Foucauldian and Marxist explanations in the prior literature....

The paper sets out a theoretical model linking stock market financial risk to labour market conditions, including labour intensity and the risk arising from the specification of labour contracts. A value added analysis is conducted combining national and firm level accounts data to examine the...

There has been considerable and ongoing debate about the performance of the British economy since 1945. Empirical studies have concentrated on aggregate or industry level indicators. Few have examined individual firms’ financial performance. This study takes a sample of c.3000 firms in 19...

Using examples from environmentally sensitive industries, the paper examines the determinants of corporate social disclosure (CSD). The paper moves beyond the traditional literature in two respects. First it is international in scope, examining the accounting disclosure responses of...

The paper analyses the social components of two theories of central importance to accounting and finance. It shows that modern finance theory is unable to account for value and that although its canon and major assumptions successfully obfuscate real social relations, they do not provide an...

The paper derives operating and financial measures of leverage and tests their association with market based measures of equity risk. It is the first such study to use purely accounting-based data to derive the leverage measures. In line with previous literature it conducts a new test on the...