The latest controversy to emerge in Australia’s ever-changing superannuation system is the failure of the proposed ‘member choice of fund’ legislation. While superannuation choice continues to be widely supported, the debate lacks coherent policy direction. This paper addresses the policy...

This paper reports findings from an ongoing collaborative research project with the Financial Services Council (FSC), which contributed funding and facilitated the survey of financial planners’ clients through FSC member organisations. The article draws on the report to the FSC that was...

Carlin and Finch, this issue, compare goodwill impairment discount rates used by a sample of large Australian firms with ‘independently’ generated discount rates. Their objective is to empirically determine whether managers opportunistically select goodwill discount rates subsequent to the...

This paper investigates associations between related party transactions (RPTs) and governance and performance factors of new economy firms. Previous research has examined the related party transactions of large U.S. firms. In contrast, we focus on smaller, newly listed Australian firms. Referred...

The global move towards choice is founded on the traditional economic assumption that well informed economic agents act rationally to maximise their self-interests. Investment choice enables superannuation fund members to select their optimal investment portfolio that matches their risk and...

The Australian accounting standard AAS 25 Financial Reporting by Superannuation Plans was the first pension accounting standard internationally to apply established conceptual framework (CF) principles. In Australia those principles have guided standard setting for more than a decade. However,...

Purpose ? The purpose of this paper is to jointly assess the impact of regulatory reform for corporate fundraising in Australia (CLERP Act 1999) and the relaxation of ASX admission rules in 1999, on the accuracy of management earnings forecasts in initial public offer (IPO) prospectuses. The...

Purpose ? The purpose of this study is to examine the usefulness of pre-production cash expenditure forecasts issued by Australian mining explorers in their quarterly cash-flow reports. Design/methodology/approach ? Usefulness is determined by examining compliance and the reliability of...

The recent decline in funding levels of defined benefit pension plans (DBPs) has attracted the attention of regulators in Australia and other jurisdictions. In light of such scrutiny, this study provides timely empirical evidence of the economic and regulatory implications of the recent change...

We examine the relation between pre-SEO announcement date misvaluation and long-run post-SEO performance for a large sample of Australian seasoned equity offerings (SEO) made between 1993 and 2001. Our study is motivated by inconsistent findings across countries with respect to the SEO long-run...