Timeliness of financial reporting is one of the attributes of good corporate governance identified by the OECD and World Bank. Shareholders and other stakeholders need information while it is still fresh and the more time that passes between year-end and disclosure, the more stale the...

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union each of the former Soviet republics has started the process of moving away from central planning and toward a market economy. Part of that process involves private sector institution building. One private sector institution that has generally experienced a...

Timeliness of financial reporting is one of the attributes of good corporate governance identified by the OECD and World Bank. Shareholders and other stakeholders need information while it is still fresh and the more time that passes between year-end and disclosure, the more stale the...

Corporate governance has received an increasing amount of attention in recent years. Corporate scandals have brought corporate governance weaknesses to the attention of the general public, especially in the United States. Weaknesses in the corporate structure of some Asian countries have been...

Corporate governance has received an increasing amount of attention in recent years. Corporate scandals have brought corporate governance weaknesses to the attention of the general public, especially in the United States. But corporate governance is sometimes a problem in other countries as...

Theory can have profound effects on practice, some intended and desirable, others unintended and undesirable. That's the story of the influence the field of law and economics has had on the domain of law and accounting. That influence comes primarily from agency theory and modern finance theory,...

Do managers exercise accounting discretion in an opportunistic or efficient manner? Good governance structures, which mitigate agency costs, are necessary to ensure that the accounting information supplied by management is not opportunistically manipulated. The output of quality accounting...

This report expands into early 2013 studies of the raw performance (profitability) of $457.6 billion of buybacks executed since 2000 by a sample of 232 corporations. The sample companies, drawn mainly from the technology sector, enjoy total equity market value today of $1.221 trillion. 75.0% of...

Union pension funds manage approximately $3.5 trillion in retirement assets on behalf of public and private sector employees covered by collective bargaining agreement. They are also very active in the proxy process, sponsoring approximately one-third of the shareholder proposals that are...