[Truncated abstract] Investor relations (IR) management encompasses a broad range of activities including voluntary disclosure, attracting analyst coverage, targeting investors, and providing feedback to corporate managers (Byrd, Goulet, Johnson and Johnson 1993; Brennan and Tamarowski 2000; Bushee and Miller 2005). In recent years, a number of high profile corporate collapses and concerns about selective disclosure have contributed to an increased awareness of the importance of effective IR practices in promoting investor confidence. To this end, Australian market regulators and industry bodies have developed a number of best practice guidelines relating to disclosure and corporate governance. The current study undertakes a comprehensive investigation of corporate approaches to IR in the Australian context, and seeks to explain cross-sectional variation in these. The sample utilised in this study comprises 129 All Ordinaries Index (AOI) constituent companies that responded to a mail survey conducted in 2006 regarding their IR practices. The survey of all AOI companies constitutes the first Australian academic survey of IR practices, and the views of the individuals responsible for the function. Self-reported data are combined with data collected from the sample entities' websites to provide a detailed overview of corporate IR programs. The results of the survey suggest that there is widespread recognition, within the sample, of the importance of devoting organisational resources to IR. ... Several proxies for the extent of investment in IR are developed in this study. Two proxies capture organisational arrangements for managing IR, one proxy captures the frequency of one-to-one meetings with analysts and investors, and one proxy captures the quality of IR websites. Multivariate analyses relate cross-sectional variation in these to a number of firm-specific variables. Consistent with findings presented in the empirical voluntary disclosure literature, this study shows that the extent of investment in IR is positively associated with firm size, a finding that is common across all IR proxies. Ownership characteristics play an important role in explaining different types of investment in IR, as captured by the four proxies. Ownership concentration is negatively associated with the likelihood of employing an external IR consultant and positively associated with the frequency with which one-to-one meetings are held with analysts and investors. Firms with a foreign stock exchange listing, a proxy for the importance of foreign investors, achieve higher scores for the quality of their IR websites. Adverse selection models of voluntary disclosure predict that firms with good news are likely to disclose more. In contrast, the results of this study show that less profitable firms and firms with lower price-to-book ratios are more likely to have an IR department/officer, and they achieve higher scores for the quality of their IR websites. Finally, the nature of the investment in IR appears to differ with sector membership. Firms in the Materials and Energy sectors held more one-to-one meetings than firms in other sectors, while firms in the Information Technology sector are more likely to have an IR department or IR officer, and have higher quality IR websites than firms in other sectors.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:ADTP/194814 |
| Date | January 2008 |
| Creators | Spaseska, Aleksandra |
| Publisher | UWA Business School |
| Source Sets | Australiasian Digital Theses Program |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Rights | Copyright Aleksandra Spaseska, http://www.itpo.uwa.edu.au/UWA-Computer-And-Software-Use-Regulations.html |
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