Organization's environmental uncertainty induces greater variability in reported earnings, and accentuates the information asymmetry between managers and outside stakeholders. Managers have the incentives to reduce such variability via income smoothing and hence reduce information asymmetry for...

This article examines the effects on cost stickiness of firms' involvement in corporate social responsibility (CSR) activities. Cost stickiness represents asymmetric cost behavior whereby the magnitude of cost increases in response to an increase in the activity level is greater than the...

This study investigates the association between financial constraints and cost stickiness. Using a large U.S. sample from 1976 to 2016, we find that financially-constrained firms exhibit cost anti-stickiness, i.e., costs increase proportionately less when sales increase; but decrease...

This paper examines the relation between business strategy and labour investment efficiency. Since business strategy affects both the agency problem and firm-level uncertainty, as well as the overall shape of corporate behaviour, we would expect the efficiency of labour investment to vary with...

Product market competition has been identified as one of the most powerful corporate governance tools for motivating managers to maximize firm value. Consistent with this view, a large body of theoretical and empirical research over the years has investigated the implications of product market...

This paper investigates the effect of customer concentration on corporate social responsibility (CSR) disclosures for a large sample of US firms. Using both corporate and government customer concentration, we find that firms with concentrated corporate customer are associated with significantly...

Corporate life cycle has received considerable interest in the accounting, finance and corporate governance literature. We synthesize this literature to inform readers about the valuable insights gained from these studies, and to outline knowledge gaps and future research directions. Although...

We investigate the relation between social capital and firms' use of trade credit in the USA. We also estimate the extent to which social capital is both directly and indirectly related to firms' use of trade credit. Using a large sample of US data, we find robust evidence that firms...

We investigate the association between joint audit and cost of debt for a sample of non-financial, publicly listed firms from the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries. Although the conventional wisdom suggests that “two heads are better than one”, empirical evidence on the beneficial...