Corporate Reporting and Urgent Issues Group Abstracts: The Impact of UIG 4 ON THE Australian Extractive Industries

The Urgent Issues Group (UIG) was established in 1994 to overcome the inability of Australian standard-setters to deal promptly with significant reporting issues. One of its first issues was accounting for restoration obligations, with the subsequent issue in August 1995 of UIG Abstract 4 Disclosure of Accounting Policies for Restoration Obligations in the Extractive Industries. This study reports on the effect of the introduction of UIG 4 on the reporting practices of companies in the extractive industries. Despite an increase in the number of companies disclosing their accounting policy and the level of information provided, the comparability, and therefore usefulness, of disclosure after the introduction of UIG 4 is still questionable.     

Odd lot trading and earnings announcements

This study investigates odd lot trading, both trades and orders, around quarterly earnings announcements to determine whether odd lot traders are informed regarding the information contained in earnings announcements. We find pre-announcement odd lot order imbalances are not positively correlated with post-announcement returns and odd lot traders do not earn excess returns. Portfolios long stocks highly bought by odd lot traders in the pre-announcement period and short stocks highly sold by odd lot traders do not outperform the market. We conclude that odd lot traders are not in possession of earnings announcement information prior to its release to the public.     

Bridging the gap: How sustainable development can help companies create shareholder value and improve financial performance

This study examines the effect of integrating sustainability into corporate strategy on various aspects of shareholder value creation and financial performance in the British capital market. The employed method is based on the content analysis of corporate disclosures and a new technique for assessing the adoption of the corporate sustainability concept (embracing the environmental, social, and financial aspects of a company's policies at the same time). Using extensive data of FTSE 350 firms covering the years 2006–2012, 65 companies were selected as meeting corporate sustainability criteria. For the above period, we find that these firms were characterized by higher financial risk exposure, lower asset growth rates, lower BV/MV ratios, lower EVA ratios, and higher MVA ratios. Such relations were generally present among different size and industry groupings. The results support the thesis that firms that incorporate sustainability issues into their business operations are better able to leverage their resources toward stronger financial performance and shareholder value creation than other companies. The paper contributes to the literature by offering a more holistic approach to corporate sustainable performance measurement and shedding additional light on its relation to financial performance in the context of the recent global financial crisis and its direct aftermath.     

‘Communities of resistance’ and the use of newspaper discussion boards: Polish workers in Japanese foreign investments

This article examines the content of 200 posts on newspaper discussion boards by workers in a cluster of Japanese foreign investments in Poland. The conclusions are first, that the material experiences of workers generate a set of themes in relation to the labour process with regard to wages and working conditions, bullying and monitoring that exhibit similarities across countries. Second, we argue that an analysis of the discourse used is shaped by political and institutional conditions, which reveal national differences in how workers perceive and locate their exploitation. Finally, in relation to debates about workers’ resistance and the use of the Internet we argue that the interaction of themes related to the material experience of work are intertwined with institutionally embedded understandings of exploitation, which not only enable a shared framework for venting, but also provide the basis for a community of resistance.     

Home sweet host: A cross‐country perspective on prudential and monetary policy spillovers through global banks

Prudential regulation of banks is multi‐layered: policy changes by home‐country authorities affect banks’ global operations across many jurisdictions; policy changes by host‐country authorities shape banks’ operations in the host jurisdiction regardless of the nationality of the parent bank. Do these policies create (unintended) cross‐border spillovers? Similarly, monetary policy actions by major central banks may also have effects on the behaviour of banks in other countries. This paper examines the effect that changes in home‐ and host‐country prudential measures have on cross‐border dollar credit provision, and how these interact with US monetary policy. We first run panel regressions with both layers of regulation, to examine which has a greater effect on cross‐border lending. We then use a novel approach to decompose growth in cross‐border bank lending into separate home, host and common components, and then match each with the corresponding home or host policies. Our results suggest that prudential policies can have spillover effects, which depend on the instrument used and on whether a bank's home or host country implemented them. Home policies tend to have larger spillovers on cross‐border US dollar lending than host policies. We also find that a tightening of US monetary policy can compound the spillovers of some prudential measures.     

Strategies for Retrenchment: Reconciling Individual and Organizational Needs

Résumé Le retranchement, c'est-à-dire la réduction des ressources humaines, mate*** rielles et financières est devenu un problème familier dans plusieurs pays. L*** taux de chǒmage a augmenté de façon dramtique en Europe comme en Amer*** que du Nord, indiquant des redondances dans les secteurs public et privé ain*** que chez les cols bleus, les cols blancs et les cadres à la suite de conditior*** économiques défavorables, de coupures gouvernementales et de changemen*** technologiques. Les statistiques stériles cachent cependant un problème tri*** humain: celui des employés qui doivent accepter la perte involontaire de lei*** emploi. Plusieurs études parues récemment accentuent l'importance des b*** soins des employés lors des coupures. Les demandes peuvent cependant ět*** ignorées dans un climat de coupures lorsque les besoins de l'entreprise o*** précédence dans un effort de réduction des coǔts.*** Pour sensibiliser les employeurs aux besoins des employés, ils doivent ěti*** informés des avantages commerciaux associés à cette approche, alors que 1*** chercheurs doivent reconnaǐtre l'importance des préoccupations de l'emloyei*** en période de coupures. Cet article explore certaines des raisons économique*** justifiant l'intérět pour les préoccupations individuelles et présente un cadi*** destiné à aider les cadres à concevoir des stratégies de retranchement qui tiei*** nent compte à la fois des besoins de l'entreprise et de l'employé. Une etude c*** huit entreprises qui ont adopté une variété de programmes de coupures impl*** quant des employés de divers niveaux est discutée, démontrant comment *** cadre peut ětre appliqué