Antalet kvinnliga styrelseledamöter i svenska börsbolag förväntas öka i och med en politisk strävan efter förbättrad jämställdhet i bolagsledningarna. På grund av att studier har funnit en skillnad i synen på risk mellan kvinnor och män är det möjligt att en representation av fler kvinnor i styrelserna skulle kunna leda till lägre earnings management då earnings management medför risk. Samtidigt har tidigare forskning på sambandet mellan kvinnor och earnings management erhållit varierande resultat. Syftet med denna uppsats är att undersöka om det finns ett negativt samband mellan kvinnliga styrelseledamöter och earnings management i svenska börsbolag. Hypoteserna har undersökts med en kvantitativ metod baserat på bolag på Nasdaq OMX Stockholm mellan åren 2010-2014, där earnings management har estimerats med Jones uppdaterade modell och sambandet mellan kvinnor och earnings management har prövats med multipla regressioner. Resultaten visar ett signifikant svagt negativt samband mellan kvinnor och earnings management.

本研究主要在探討「強制公開制度對財務報表品質的影響」。強制公司公開發行是否有其必要性一直是各界所爭論的議題，藉著研究繼續保持公開發行與撤銷公開發行二類公司盈餘品質之異同，本研究提供證據證明強制公開發行此一政策是否有效。本研究用來衡量盈餘品質之代理變數有盈餘穩健性及避免負盈餘，實證結果顯示在控制規模的影響後，繼續公開發行公司之盈餘穩健性較撤銷公開發行公司為佳。而在避免負盈餘方面，二類公司都有避免負盈餘的傾向，唯二類公司差異並不顯著。本研究之結果顯示，我們無法要求自願公開與受法令規定而公開發行此二類公司有相同的盈餘品質，我期望本研究之結果能做為主管機關在制定相關法令時之參考依據。 / The main purpose of this study is to examine the impact of force the company public on the quality of financial report. We provide evidence that the policy of force the company public is effectiveness or not. This study uses earnings conservatism and likelihood of negative earrings benchmark as dependent variables. The results show that, after controlling firm size effect, earnings quality of keeping public firms is better than that of going private firms in earnings conservatism. So it concludes that people are unable to request the two kinds firms to have the same earnings quality, I expects that this finding can be a reference when government legislates the related law.

Earnings management and accounting fraud are detrimental to the integrity of financial reporting, and more worryingly, are pervasive. Furthermore, there is often a grey area in which individuals regularly question whether or not specified accounting methods are strictly legal and permitted, or an underhanded abuse of GAAP-granted flexibility. In response, recently there has been an uprising of legislation attempting to curb the incidence of both these events, but there is still question as to whether or not these attempts are effective, or even wholly necessary. This piece examines methods of accounting manipulation through an analysis of cases, and then analyzes the effects on companies of attempts at both regulation and prevention.

This paper analyses the gender earnings gap in Sweden at career entry, for individuals with comparable educational profile. There are many studies on this topic. Usually, researchers are focusing their attention on the evolution of this gap through individuals’ career. Our paper concentrates only on individual’s career entry, to exclude work experience as an explanatory factor. By studying six different educational fields we can have a precise image of the use of human ressources in the economy.An empirical analysis has been conducted using the method of OLS on a restricted data sample concerning graduates, having accomplished at least two years of university education. The result showed that, even at career entry, the raw gender earnings gap is of 20,2%. After controlling for fields of studies and occupations, the gap is reduced to 15,4%. This gap fluctuates among different fields of education, depending on the society’s perception of these fields. We distinguish male-dominated (i.e. Engineering and manufacturing), female-dominated (i.e. Teaching methods and teacher education) and gender-neutral (i.e. Social sciences, law, commerce and administration) educational fields. Our results depict some large gender earnings gap within male-dominated fields of study – women earn on average 20% less than their male counterparts when studying Engineering and manufacturing – and rather small ones within female-dominated and gender-neutral fields of study but due to statistical insignificance of the gender dummy coefficients we cannot make a conclusion concerning these fields.

This paper will analyze the usefulness of depreciation expense to investors. Depreciation expense is a broad allocation accounting practice that treats different types of assets the same. I argue that there are two types of industries: those with wasting assets, and those with real property. The first type experiences true deprecation and deterioration while the second type of asset does not. A simplified model using the earnings response coefficient will measure the relationship between earnings and returns for these different industries; this measurement is a way to quantify usefulness of accounting information. I hypothesize that investors of companies with high wasting assets will find depreciation more useful than those invested in companies with more real property. However, the results were not consistent with my hypothesis – depreciation did not matter more to investors of the industry with high wasting assets. The data set only included two distinct industries, which limited the sample size considerably, and might explain the results. Alternatively, the two groups of assets could be defined more broadly to include more industries for future research.

The primary purpose of this study will be to compare the equitableness of utility earnings as a source of municipal revenue when compared to that of property taxes.

In November 2002, the Securities and Exchange Commission released a final ruling regarding a filing requirement change. The proposed requiredment change was for domestic companies to file annual and quarterly reports within 60 and 30 days, respectfully. This requirement was recommended for companies with a market value of at least $75 million and would reduce by 30 days the time allowed to file these reports. The Wall Street Journal article announcing this proposal stated the change was an effort to address some of the problems arising from accounting scandals such as the Enron scandal of 2001. A potential added benefit of the SEC rule change might be a reduction in earnings management. The purpose of this study is two fold. The first part is to test the theory that earnings management takes time. The second purpose is to examine the question of market recognition of earnings management. Sloan (1996) and other researchers report that the market does not recognize earnings management in the long term. Xie's (2001) results suggest that the market over prices earnings management. Balsam et al. (2002) found the market reacted negatively to abnormal accruals. The current research study uses a larger sample including firms not suspected of earnings management and fails to confirm the Balsam et al. result. The findings of the current study suggest that the results of the Balsam et al. study are either the result of the data selection process used in that study or the data selection processs used by Balsam et al. controlled for other market fluctuations not included in the current study. The results of this study suggest a positive relationship between earnings management and the time to file annual reports. Thsi finding supports the theory that moving earnings management from a future period to the current period requires time. Thus, the SEC rule change to reduce the time to file annual reports should reduce a company's ability to manipulate earnings.

This thesis examines the response of a representative agent investor to sequences (streaks) of quarterly earnings surprises over a period of twelve quarters using the United States S&P500 constituent companies sample frame in the years 1991 to 2006. This examination follows the predictive performance of the representative agent model of Rabin (2002b) [Inference by believers in the law of small numbers. The Quarterly Journal of Economics. 117(3).p.775 816] and Barberis, Shleifer, and Vishny (1998) [A model of investor sentiment. Journal of Financial Economics. 49. p.307 343] for an investor who might be under the influence of the law of small numbers, or another closely related cognitive bias known as the gambler s fallacy. Chapters 4 and 5 present two related empirical studies on this broad theme. In chapter 4, for successive sequences of annualised quarterly earnings changes over a twelve-quarter horizon of quarterly earnings increases or falls, I ask whether the models can capture the likelihood of reversion. Secondly, I ask, what is the representative investor s response to observed sequences of quarterly earnings changes for my S&P500 constituent sample companies? I find a far greater frequency of extreme persistent quarterly earnings rises (of nine quarters and more) than falls and hence a more muted reaction to their occurrence from the market. Extreme cases of persistent quarterly earnings falls are far less common than extreme rises and are more salient in their impact on stock prices. I find evidence suggesting that information discreteness; that is the frequency with which small information about stock value filters into the market is one of the factors that foment earnings momentum in stocks. However, information discreteness does not subsume the impact of sequences of annualised quarterly earnings changes, or earnings streakiness as a strong candidate that drives earnings momentum in stock returns in my S&P500 constituent stock sample. Therefore, earnings streakiness and informational discreteness appear to have separate and additive effects in driving momentum in stock price. In chapter 5, the case for the informativeness of the streaks of earnings surprises is further strengthened. This is done by examining the explanatory power of streaks of earnings surprises in a shorter horizon of three days around the period when the effect of the nature of earnings news is most intense in the stock market. Even in shorter windows, investors in S&P500 companies seem to be influenced by the lengthening of negative and positive streaks of earnings surprises over the twelve quarters of quarterly earnings announcement I study here. This further supports my thesis that investors underreact to sequences of changes in their expectations about stock returns. This impact is further strengthened by high information uncertainties in streaks of positive earnings surprise. However, earnings streakiness is one discrete and separable element in the resolution of uncertainty around equity value for S&P 500 constituent companies. Most of the proxies for earnings surprise show this behaviour especially when market capitalisation, age and cash flow act as proxies of information uncertainty. The influence of the gambler s fallacy on the representative investor in the presence of information uncertainty becomes more pronounced when I examine increasing lengths of streaks of earnings surprises. The presence of post earnings announcement drift in my large capitalised S&P500 constituents sample firms confirms earnings momentum to be a pervasive phenomenon which cuts across different tiers of the stock markets including highly liquid stocks, followed by many analysts, which most large funds would hold.

Student Number : 9307680N - MA research report - School of Philosophy - Faculty of Humanities / Many individuals working in South Africa earn extremely low wages. I briefly discuss these low wages, and examine their implications for the shareholders (owners and controllers of businesses) in South Africa. I argue that shareholders, in particular, have a moral duty to increase the absolute level of the wages of their lowest paid workers. In this essay I choose to develop this position in the context of Kantian distributive justice. I seek to join distributive justice and Kantianism together to evaluate the moral status of the lowest paid workers. I propose a just means of allocating the benefits of wages according to the work performed that shows respect for workers’ autonomy. Current South African stakeholder theory includes ‘equity’ claims arising from compensatory justice issues. However, based on the arguments in this essay, I believe we can see that there is also a definite independent moral duty in distributive justice for shareholders to increase the amounts that they spend on their worst-off employees. This spend is not necessarily only the wage costs for these employees, but is also on self-empowerment tools such as education and community services with which employees can build their life plans.

This thesis examines the joint impact of earnings management incentives (i.e., income smoothing, solvency management and tax management) and reinsurance, together with other institutional factors, on the magnitude and direction of claim (loss) reserves errors in the UK’s property-liability insurance industry. Two reserve error definitions, found in literature, are employed to conduct the analysis. Furthermore, a panel data generalised methods of moments (GMM) estimator is employed to incorporate the dynamic nature of current and past loss reserving errors. Using the GMM estimator in a panel of 151 firms over a period from 1991 and 2005, the study finds support for the conclusions of some prior studies but also inconsistencies with other previous research. The present study finds that the inferences drawn from empirical analyses can be influenced by the definition of loss reserving errors and to some extent how other incentive variables are defined. The results of this study suggest that discretionary loss reserving behaviour tends to persist from one year to another. Therefore, ignoring the dynamic nature of loss reserving errors could lead to biased and unreliable conclusions. The empirical results of this study also find that property-liability insurance managers manipulate claims reserves in order to smooth company’s earnings across accounting periods. Furthermore, empirical evidence is found which indicates that high levels of reinsurance ceded help to reduce the incidence of error in loss reserves. Contrary to expectations, the evidence presented in this thesis suggests that highly solvent insurers under-estimate their claims liabilities. However, no empirical support is found to indicate that insurers over-reserve in order to reduce and/or postpone period tax liabilities. The study also produced mixed results regarding the relation between the type of reinsurance cover used and claim reserve errors. Nevertheless, the empirical results show that firm-specific effects, such as company size and product mix, can have effect on the accuracy of insurers’ reserves. Finally, as this study gives an important insight on discretionary loss reserve manipulation, its conclusions could be of interest and relevance to the business decisions of investors, policyholders, regulators, and other interested parties (e.g., credit rating agencies and accounting standard settlers).