This thesis contains three essays on disclosure of holdings by institutional investors. Chapter 1 presents a theoretical model that examines the impact of confidential treatment requests made by institutional investors to the Securities and Ex- change Commission (SEC) to delay disclosure of their holdings. Chapter 2 presents another theoretical model that analyses how an informed trader trades strategically in the presence of copycats who track his disclosed trades. Chapter 3 is an empirical study that examines the impact of more frequent portfolio disclosure on mutual funds' performance.

This thesis examines settings where multiple decision makers with conflicting interests benefit from cooperation in joint combinatorial optimisation problems. It draws on cooperative game theory, polyhedral theory and graph theory to address cost sharing in joint single-source shortest path problems and joint weighted minimum colouring problems. The primary focus of the thesis are problems where each agent corresponds to a vertex of an undirected complete graph, in which a special vertex represents the common supplier. The joint combinatorial optimisation problem consists of determining the shortest paths from the supplier to all other vertices in the graph. The optimal solution is a shortest path tree of the graph and the aim is to allocate the cost of this shortest path tree amongst the agents. The thesis defines shortest path tree problems, proposes allocation rules and analyses the properties of these allocation rules. It furthermore introduces shortest path tree games and studies the properties of these games. Various core allocations for shortest path tree games are introduced and polyhedral properties of the core are studied. Moreover, computational results on finding the core and the nucleolus of shortest path tree games for the application of cost allocation in Wireless Multihop Networks are presented. The secondary focus of the thesis are problems where each agent is interested in having access to a number of facilities but can be in conflict with other agents. If two agents are in conflict, then they should have access to disjoint sets of facilities. The aim is to allocate the cost of the minimum number of facilities required by the agents amongst them. The thesis models these cost allocation problems as a class of cooperative games called weighted minimum colouring games, and characterises total balancedness and submodularity of this class of games using the properties of the underlying graph.

No description available.

This study focuses on users of online reporting rather than corporations. It examines the extent to which users find online reporting important as a source of corporate information, and whether they perceive it useful and easy to use in making their investment decisions. To achieve this, 2,229 online questionnaires were sent to professional and private investors asking them about their perceptions of online reporting. Based on 162 responses, an Online Reporting Acceptance Model (ORAM) was established to investigate variables that drive users' acceptance of online reporting, proxied by actual usage. Empirical results revealed that there is a room for improving the quality of online reporting in the UK as users are in favour of having more information and technological facilities available on corporate web sites. Furthermore, users find online reporting so useful in making their investment decision that it has become the most important source of corporate information. The Online Reporting Acceptance Model provided evidence that both usefulness and ease of use are major determinants of actual usage. The study also examines the impact of online reporting quality on analysts' behaviour. It proposes a thematic multidimensional online reporting index to measure the quality of online reporting by FTSE 350 listed firms. It is found that companies with higher online reporting quality are more likely to be followed by financial analysts. However, the study found no impact of the quality of online reporting on either error or dispersion of analysts' EPS forecasts and common uncertainty in their information environment. One possible explanation for the insignificant relationship between online reporting quality and properties of analysts' forecasts is herding behaviour by analysts. Consistent with prior studies, results provided evidence of herding behaviour by financial analysts in the UK.

This thesis provides a better understanding of budgetary process and its characteristics in PJUs. This study aims at exploring budgetary process in such private universities, which includes the features of budgeting system applied: budget committee, budget accountant, budget format, the relation with Ministry of Higher Education (MoHE). The research aims also at studying the level of budget participation and related factors, researching the perceptions about budget procedures, investigating the impact of managers and department factors on budget characteristics, as well as examining the effects of budget participation on managerial performance. The investigation into the above objectives is approached through the employment of various methods. This thesis interviews sixteen budget preparers across eleven universities and a further three in the MoHE; and it collects 77 completed questionnaires from five PJUs. The research also employs archival documents, observations, guidelines and reports in order to accomplish the study objectives. This study adopts both qualitative and quantitative approaches in order to enhance the understanding of the researched phenomena and to highlight a number of findings. First, despite the similar features of PJUs, the budget process is dissimilar in these universities, in terms of the existence of the budget committee, budget accountant and participation procedures. Second, the results explain that all private universities adopt the MoHE budget format, but only seven out of nine apply it in their operations. The findings also indicate that three universities allow the lowest level of management to participate in the budget, four fulfil the minimum requirements of MoHE and allow the second level of management to participate, while two other universities adopt a centralised approach and do not allow the department managers to participate. Fourth, the interview results reveal inconsistency between university managers concerning their satisfaction with the MoHE budget. On the other hand, MoHE staff agreed that private universities comply with the requirements of the ministry. Fifth, there is no significant relation between the features of managers and their department with budget characteristics. Sixth, critically, the results suggest that budget participation is related to managerial performance. This study, therefore, concludes that the budget procedures should not exclude any manager in the university; and that budget participation will enhance the performance of the department managers.

The present study is an empirically based analysis of liquidity management. The study contributes to the understanding of how U.K.-based companies handle the problem of unexpected events which have major negative implications for the expected funds flow equilibrium of the firm. In particular, the study was aimed at discovering the kind of liquidity management being implemented in practice, and the relationship between specific liquidity management practices and certain characteristics of the firm, and of its (headquarters) finance department. Evidence of the subject in the U.K. is very thin. It is therefore important to collect information on the state of the art in the practice of liquidity management in the U.K. particularly since, for the last decade, companies have been so negatively affected by the instability and unpredictability of the business environment. The study also contributes to the identification of differences between theory and practice. In this respect, it is expected that the recognition of actual differences will challenge not only the level at which companies practice liquidity management but also the teaching of the subject in current corporate finance courses.

Traditional models of analyzing the general insurance market often focus on the behavior of a single insurer in a competitive market. They assume that the major players in this market are homogeneous and have a common goal to achieve a same long-term business objective, such as solving profit (or utility) maximization. Therefore these individual players in the traditional models can be implemented as a single representative economic agent with full rationality to solve the utility optimization. To investigate insurance pricing (or underwriting) cycles, the existing literature attempts to model various isolated aspects of the market, keeping other factors exogenous. We and that a multi-agent system describing an insurance market affords a helpful understanding of the dynamic interactions of individual agents that is a complementary to the traditional models. Such agent-based models (ABM) try to capture the complexity of the real world. Thus, economic agents are heterogeneous and follow divergent behavioral rules depending on their current unique competitive situations or comparative advantages relating to, for example, their existing market shares, distribution channels, information processes and product differentiations. The real-world continually-evolving environment leads agents to follow common rules of thumb to implement their business strategies, rather than completely be utility-maximizer with perfect foresight in an idealized world. The agents are adaptively learning from their local competition over time. In fact, the insurance cycles are the results of these dynamic interactions of agents in such complex system.

Modern business has made it necessary for International Accounting Standards to be developed, so that we can achieve harmonisation. Accounting has been transmitted in accounting practices from one country to another, generating a specific international accounting system that exhibits both similarities and differences with local accounting practices. The adoption of IAS to the Kuwaiti environment started in 1990. This puts Kuwait among the countries, which implemented IAS at its early stage. This study focuses primarily on measuring accountants', auditors', and external users' attitudes towards using IAS in Kuwait and its consequent difficulties.

No description available.

No description available.