A central tenet of economic sociology is that culture and regulatory institutions help to constitute the nature of economic actors and guide their actions, thus affecting economic outcomes (see, e.g., DiMaggio, 1994; Smelser and Swedberg, 1994). As socially organised agents operating in different...

U.K. guidelines on the introduction of new regulations require that politicians and civil servants should “think small first” when deciding whether and how to introduce new regulations that affect business. Similar guidelines are currently being adopted across the EU. This paper presents the...

The principles of business taxation are governed by the Adam Smith’s fourth canon of taxation : ‘every tax ought to be so contrived as both to take out and keep out of the pockets of the people as little as possible, over and above what it brings into the treasury of the state’. However,...

The bidder who wins at an auction may end up paying more for an asset than it is actually worth. This, stated very simply, is the so-called winner's curse. Consider the simplest possible case where the asset has the same actual value to all bidders, but bidders do not know for certain what that...

In this paper, we document how European companies can use financial tunnelling to the disadvantageof minority shareholders, despite improved legislation directed at eliminating such activities. In fourcase studies, two German and two Italian, we document how newly established corporate...

Project risk management has become an important area of interest in project management practice over the past decade. Numerous best practice standards, tools and techniques have been developed focussing on a more effective risk management process. This process consists of four main phases:...

A growing literature is using stock return synchronicity, or the R2 from a market model regression,as an inverse measure of the extent to which firm-specific information is reflected in stock prices. Inthis paper, we argue that the relationship between R2 and the informativeness of stock prices...

We contribute to the earnings management literature and provide insights for accounting regulatorsby investigating the impact of FRS3 on accruals management by UK firms. FRS3 mandated net incomeper share, whilst allowing the release of incremental information on sustainable profitability....

We use multivariate regime switching vector autoregressive models to characterize the time-varyinglinkages among the Irish stock market, one of the top world performers of the 1990s, and the US andUK stock markets. We ¯nd that two regimes, characterized as bear and bull states, are required...

A growing number of studies in finance decompose multi-period buy-and-hold portfolioreturns into a series of single period returns. The method used to decomposethese returns is important because researchers use them in tests of asset pricing modelsand market efficiency and in evaluating the...