The primary aim of this study is to investigate the stock return volatility surrounding management earnings forecasts. Disclosure by managers of expected earnings are particularly important communications, and as such, it is important to understand the capital market implications surrounding them. In doing so, the research questions are essentially aimed at examining the stock return volatility, first, at the release of a management earnings forecast, and second, at the eventual announcement of the realised earnings for that period. The first test investigates whether there is an increase in volatility surrounding a management earnings forecast for those firms who release them compared to a matched-firm sample of firms without a management earnings forecast at that date, and then further examines that result based on different forecast antecedents and forecast characteristics. Next, this study tests, for firms who do release a management earnings forecast during the year, whether stock volatility is lower than firms who do not release a management earnings forecast at the eventual earnings announcement date. In brief, the evidence using the Garman and Klass [1980] ???best analytic scale-invariant estimator??? of volatility in an Australian context, between 1993 and 2003, finds that stock return volatility is greater for bad news forecasts, forecasts of low specificity, and forecasts issued by firms perceived ex ante as being of lower credibility using both permutation analysis and modelling daily volatility. At the earnings announcement date, however, there is no evidence that stock return volatility is lower for firms that issue management earnings forecasts during the year. Overall, this result challenges the information asymmetry argument in the literature that disclosure will reduce volatility in the long-run.

The top management team is important to understand as the executives within the top management team would have long-term implications for a firm's investment, operating and financing decisions which would affect the firm value. As these executives may have pre-existing connections outside the current firm, they are likely to be affected by these connections within the top management team. In this dissertation, I draw upon the literature in sociology that discusses different mechanisms of connections; 1) better information transfer, 2) cohesion and better coordination, and 3) favorable treatment to see how the connections within the top management team affects different decisions for the firm using data from 1999 to 2013. First, I find that the executives with connections to the CEO are less likely to be forced out and those with social connections to the CEO enjoy less sensitivity of involuntary turnover to performance. Notably, I find that this is consistent with CEOs favorably treating the connected executives rather than CEOs keeping connected executives for the benefits. Second, I find that firms with greater percentage of executives with connections to the CEO have greater accruals earnings management and lower likelihood of detection of accounting manipulations. I also show that the connections have an effect only when the joint tenure between the CEO and the executives are short. Finally, I document that firms with more closely connected top management team issue management earnings forecasts in a more precise form and issue more frequent and accurate forecasts. I show that this matters more when the top management team’s external network size is small. / Business Administration/Accounting

This thesis consists of three studies on corporate governance issues of Chinese listed companies. In the first study, I investigate the role of board secretaries in management earnings forecasts. Individuals in this senior executive position are responsible for coordinating information disclosure. I find that their legal and accounting expertise and foreign experience help improve management earnings forecast quality. The quality of forecasts, as indicated by forecast occurrence, frequency, precision and accuracy, is positively associated with board secretaries' duality role and equity holdings, whereas it is negatively associated with their political connections. The quality of forecasts is found to increase the compensation of board secretaries. Finally, I show that the equity holdings of board secretaries reduce litigation risks and increase corporate philanthropic giving. Based on the notion that women cooperate more with women than with men, my second study examines the gender interaction effect between female top managers and female board directors in Chinese firms. I show that this gender interaction is positively associated with the firm's accounting return but negatively associated with its stock price return. Earnings management, which can lead to overstated accounting numbers but unfavourable stock market reactions, partly explains the opposite results. Furthermore, I find that only the newly appointed female top managers engage in this earnings management. Overall, the findings suggest that the pressure on women to perform leads to 'women helping women', which is detrimental to shareholders' value. Women are underrepresented on corporate boards. By employing the large variation in socioeconomic development across provinces of China, the third study shows that the barriers to board gender diversity are deeply rooted in societal gender role attitudes. I find that corporate boards tend to be more gender diverse in a province where there is a smaller gender difference in educational achievement in STEM disciplines, where there is a stronger belief that women and men possess equal intrinsic abilities, or where female political leaders are present in the provincial government or communist party. However, I find little evidence that female labour force participation or childcare provision would affect board gender diversity. Collectively, the findings suggest that it is the gender equality attitudes rather than the supply of average female labour that contribute to gender-diverse corporate boards.

本研究以日本東京證券交易所上市公司為研究對象，探討董事會成員年齡與強制性盈餘預測之關聯性。本研究將董事會成員年齡區分為五種：董事長的年齡、董事會成員的平均年齡、董事會成員年齡的標準差、董事會成員最高年齡跟最低年齡的差距及董事長年齡是否高於董事會成員平均年齡，以測試其所發布盈餘預測準確度與盈餘預測偏差之關聯性。而實證結果發現董事長的年齡越大、董事會成員的平均年齡越大、董事長年齡高於董事會成員平均年齡時，所發布的盈餘預測準確度也就越高，且傾向較為保守的盈餘預測。而董事會成員年齡的標準差越大、董事會成員最高年齡與最低年齡差距越大時，所發布的盈餘預測準確度較低，且傾向較為樂觀的盈餘預測。