We document, describe and interpret changes in New Zealand corporate board characteristics between 1995 and 2010, a period centred around the 2003 introduction of the NZX Corporate Governance Best Practice Code. Unsurprisingly, the representation of non-executive, independent and female...

Long-term commitments to make output-based payments for infrastructure can encourage private investors to provide socially valuable services. Making good decisions about such commitments is difficult, however, unless the government understands the fiscal costs and risks of possible commitments....

A problem that often arises in applied finance is one where decision-makers need to choose a value for some parameter that will affect the cash flows between two parties, such as a rental rate or an exercise price. Because the values of the cash flows also depend on various unobservable...

Using a sample of non-financial New Zealand companies we examine whether firms that use financial derivative instruments are more financially constrained compared to those that do not hedge. We find a significantly positive relationship between derivative usage and financial leverage and a...

Racehorse trainers operate asset management businesses in which the assets owned by outside clients compete with those owned by managers for the latter's time, care and attention. Although this potentially leads to serious conflicts of interest, we find no evidence of an agency problem: in a...

Does the payment of peanuts tend to result in the hiring of monkeys? Unfortunately, privacy and other constraints on data mean that surprisingly little is known about this issue. In this paper, I use some unique data from the New Zealand academic system to provide direct evidence that pay levels...

A large body of evidence suggests that investor protection regulation assists the development of major stock exchanges, but this leaves open the question of whether or not the same level of regulation should be applied to all centralised trading platforms. This paper argues that regulatory...

Popular investment advice recommends that the stock/bond and stock/wealth ratios should rise with investor risk tolerance and investment horizon respectively, prescriptions that are difficult to reconcile with standard models of portfolio choice. Canner et al. (1997) point out that the first...