Your Governance or Mine?

In response to criticism directed at the resource sector's corporate governance, this paper examines the corporate governance and underlying firm characteristics of resource development stage entities (DSEs) relative to a size‐matched sample of non‐resource firms. We find that resource DSEs have different governance characteristics in the measures of board independence, chair/CEO duality and CEO cash bonuses. Furthermore, there are differences in the information environment measures of analyst following, debt levels, stock market return and stock turnover. Considering we document substantial differences in underlying firm characteristics, corporate governance differences are likely appropriate to the mining industry and should not be uniformly labelled as ‘bad’. Our results suggest that media rankings based on corporate governance scores may not accurately portray the resource sector. Overall, our results are of interest to Australian investors and regulators and contribute to a broader understanding of contextually contingent corporate governance.     

Predicting the Failure of Developmental Gold Mining Projects

This paper investigates firm‐level financial and non‐financial information and their association with project failure for a sample of pre‐production gold development firms. Pre‐revenue generating ‘single project’ mining companies are chosen, since project failure is synonymous with company failure for these firms. The setting is interesting due to the high information asymmetry and limitations of the GAAP‐based Altman Z‐score in this context. A definition of project failure is applied and both financial and non‐financial predictors are compared. Failure is driven by whether the deposit is open pit or underground, and whether the cash cost of production is disclosed at feasibility completion.     

Financial Opacity and Firm Performance: The Readability of REIT Annual Reports

We examine the capital market pricing implications of firm disclosure opacity as measured by the linguistic readability of REIT annual reports. The SEC has expressed concern that firms selectively manage the transparency of disclosures in order to hide adverse information. After controlling for other non-experimental factors that influence the readability of REIT financial statements, we find (1) financial opacity is negatively related to reported firm performance, and (2) the residual opacity that remains after controlling for other determinants of annual report readability has incremental explanatory power for returns beyond the Fama and French (1992, 1993) risk factors. The opacity risk-return premium persists after controlling for a (heretofore undocumented) stark monotonic decrease in annual report readability following the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002.     

‘All sorts and conditions of men’: The social origins of the founders of the ICAEW

The early organisation of accountants in Scotland during the 1850s and 1860s has excited the intellectual curiosity and research endeavour of a number of students of professionalisation. By contrast, until recently there was a dearth of academic interest in institutional developments in England and Wales during the 1870s and 1880s. Yet, organisations such as the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales (ICAEW) which emanate from this period soon became the most significant players on the British professional scene and were to exert considerable influence on the development of accountancy institutions and professional ideologies in several locations. Exploiting a variety of genealogical sources this paper seeks to fill a void in the literature by analysing the social origins of the founding members of the principal professional association in England and Wales. It provides evidence of early chartered accountancy as a destination for long distance, upwardly mobile males, both intergenerationally and intragenerationally. The rate of self-recruitment among the founders of the ICAEW is shown to be low. The proportion of founders deriving from the upper and upper-middle classes is revealed to have been markedly less than that of their Scottish counterparts. The paper contributes to understandings of the complex professionalisation of British accountants, the extent of social mobility in Victorian Britain, the pathways to social advance in a class-based society, and illuminates the social complexion of one of the ‘new’ professions which emerged during the nineteenth century.     

<Emphasis Type="Italic">GTE Sylvania</Emphasis> and Interbrand Competition as the Primary Concern of Antitrust Law

Footnote 19 of the landmark U.S. antitrust decision in Continental T.V. v. GTE Sylvania, Inc. 433 U.S. 36 (1977) declares that “Interbrand competition … is the primary concern of antitrust law.” We trace the antecedents and influence of this declaration, argue that it is inappropriate, and conclude that it should be abandoned.     

Regularity conditions and scope estimates: The case of large-sized U.S. banks

We consider economies and diseconomies of scope for large U.S. banks by employing ordinary and hybrid translog cost functions. We examine the regularity conditions in output space where scope estimates are calculated and reject all models for which these conditions fail. The translog model always possesses violations. For the hybrid translog, violations occur in every case except one. In this one case, we find economies of scope.     

A ‘Copernican Revolution’ in French Industrial Relations: Are the Times a’ Changing?

In 1998 and 1999 France passed the sixth and seventh laws in seventeen years affecting working time. They offered financial incentives to firms signing collective agreements that created or protected jobs and cut the legal working week from 39 to 35 hours from 1 January 2000. Early evidence suggests that while their direct job creation effect is limited they are moderating wage settlements and leading to more flexible working patterns. In this paper I situate the new hour laws within the long historical tradition of state political intervention over working time and argue that this remains a key element in reforming French industrial relations.