Do analysts who understand accounting conservatism exhibit better forecasting performance?

This study investigates the performance of analysts when they match the asymmetric timeliness of their earnings forecast revisions (i.e., asymmetric forecast timeliness) with the asymmetric timeliness of firms’ reported earnings (i.e., asymmetric earnings timeliness). We find that better timeliness‐matching analysts produce more accurate earnings forecasts and elicit stronger market reactions to their forecast revisions. Further, better timeliness‐matching analysts issue less biased earnings forecasts, more profitable stock recommendations and have more favorable career outcomes. Overall, our results indicate that analysts’ ability to incorporate conditional conservatism into their earnings forecasts is an important reflection of analyst expertise and professional success.     

Assessing Financial Performance of Malaysian Islamic and Conventional Commercial Banks Using Financial Ratios

A rapid growth of Islamic banking has led the Malaysian economy to gaining greater prosperity than before. Presently, there are more than 20 Islamic banks operating in Malaysia. Financial ratios calculated from the categories of liquidity, profitability, risk and solvency, and efficiency of banks can be used to gauge the overall financial performance of the banking industry. The objective is to assess the overall performance of Islamic banks as well as conventional banks in Malaysia using financial ratios. The findings indicated that conventional commercial banks in Malaysia do have better quality assets, are more liquid, and are more profitable than Islamic banks. Total expenses in conventional banks are much higher, which may affect profitability and the significant amount of non-performing loans （NPLs）, thus increasing solvency risk. The findings show positive insights of Islamic banks, whose confidence and trust are rising, over a short period with strong improvements in asset utilization, effective management, and expenditure control. This comparative study clearly identified that conventional banks are better financial performers compared to Islamic banks in Malaysia during the period of 2006-2010.     

Lessons from My School

This article presents analyses of the National Assessment Program – Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN) data and data on other indicators that are made available through the My School website. There are large differences across states and types of schools (independent, Catholic and government) in the Year 3 NAPLAN outcomes, though the differences across states tend to diminish as outcomes for later years of study are examined. Some schools are shown to consistently have academic outcomes better than their characteristics would otherwise indicate; conversely, other schools are shown to consistently have academic outcomes below the levels their characteristics would otherwise indicate. Few of these differences are statistically significant.     

Motivations and Use Context in Mobile Tourism Shopping: Applying Contingency and Task–Technology Fit Theories

Mobile tourism shopping is an emerging market, but there is little theoretically based research on the topic. This study investigates the impact of motivations (value, enjoyment, time saving and mobility) on consumer satisfaction by applying contingency and task–technology fit theories in the mobile tourism shopping context. The results show that value and enjoyment have significant effects on satisfaction. Use context is found to have a full mediating role between time saving and satisfaction as well as between mobility and satisfaction. This study offers theoretical and practical contributions to the tourism literature and mobile tourism industry. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Unbundling institutional determinants of multinational investments

Previous studies often examined how a broad-based institution affects foreign direct investment (FDI) flows across countries. However, analysis of differential impacts of two or more constituent institutions within a broad-based institution appears to be more useful for policy decision-making. There is a paucity of studies on how constituent institutions within a broad measure of institution affect FDI across countries. Our article constitutes the first attempt in bridging this gap. In this article, we examine the relative effects of property rights institution (PI) and contracting institution (CI) on investment flows. Our results show that PI is much more important than CI in determining the cross-border flows of FDI and affiliate sales. Moreover, PI is found to be more important for FDI than for affiliate sales, indicating that final goods are less of a concern for being expropriated by governments and powerful elites than capital goods. Through unbundling a broad-based institution and examining how the constituent institutions affect investments flows, our article provides practical location decisions for investments in FDI, mergers and acquisitions (M&A) and affiliate sales.     

The Determinants of Foreign Direct Investment in Malaysia: A Revisit

Abstract

The paper re-examines the determinants of foreign direct investment (FDI) in Malaysia, for the period 1970–2006. The cointegration results show that market size of both Malaysia and China have major, and a statistically significant impact, on FDI inflow to Malaysia. The results seem to support the argument that foreign investors tend to be more attracted to the country with a higher growth rate of gross domestic product (GDP) because it indicates a larger potential demand for their products. In addition, the results also demonstrate that openness level of the country has a positive and statistically significant effect on FDI inflow, which supports the hypothesis that FDI can be attracted to a country with more liberalized economic reforms. Finally, the results show that literacy rate (human capital development) has significant positive effect on FDI inflow. The finding suggests the need for labor force expansion and education policy to raise the stock of human capital in the country. Using Granger causality test, we also find that there exist unidirectional causality from real GDP of both Malaysia and China, degree of openness and literacy rate to FDI inflow.     

Perceiving Airbnb as sharing economy: the issue of trust in using Airbnb

Airbnb is a growing business and has received much research attention. However, no research has specifically examined complaints against Airbnb. Understanding complaints serves not as a way to help improve services but provides an insight into guests’ perception of the Airbnb. I examined 664 reviews on sitejabber.com to study the common complaints and whether they are related to the perception that Airbnb is sharing economy. Using a grounded theory approach, I performed a content analysis of complaints. Besides customer service and technology challenges, one major complaint against Airbnb is their faded trust through their experiences.     

Demand for fair value accounting: The case of the asset revaluation boom in Korea during the global financial crisis

When the fair value accounting (FVA) option for property, plant, and equipment was introduced in the midst of the global financial crisis, a significant proportion of Korean firms elected FVA. We attribute this unusual boom in asset revaluations to the nation's culture of government intervention and civilian compliance, which was particularly espoused during this period of financial turmoil, and a foreseeable option to switch back to historical cost accounting. We find that among those firms whose debt‐to‐equity ratios are low, public firms opt for the FVA option more often than private firms, suggesting that the need to communicate fair value information with diversified equity holders is more important than the need to do so with creditors. In contrast, among those firms whose debt‐to‐equity ratios are high enough to warrant such unfavorable dispositions as new debt freezes and monitoring by regulators, we find no difference in the FVA choice between private and public firms. These findings imply that during the global financial crisis, private firms that rely heavily on debt financing have a strong incentive to utilize FVA to comply with government guidelines for the debt‐to‐equity ratio and to ease a potential hold‐up problem by influential creditors.     

Effective fair pricing of international mutual funds

We propose a new methodology to provide fair prices of international mutual funds by adjusting prices at the individual security level using a comprehensive and economically relevant information set. Stepwise regressions are used to endogenously determine the stock-specific optimal set of factors. Using 16 synthetic funds whose characteristics are extracted from 16 corresponding actual US-based Japanese mutual funds, we demonstrate that our method estimates fund prices significantly more accurately than existing methods. Although existing fair-pricing methods provide an improvement over the current practice of simply using Japanese market closing prices, they are still highly vulnerable to exploitation by market-timers. By contrast, our method is the most successful in preventing such strategic exploitation since no competing method can profit from our stated prices.     

Investment climate and foreign direct investment in Malaysia: firm‐level evidence

Most of the foreign direct investment (FDI) studies on location determinants are based on macroeconomic characteristics. However, it is important to understand to what extent microeconomic obstacles hinder FDI. This study explores obstacles to FDI in Malaysia, based on firm‐level data. To overcome the problem of uncertainty in variable selection, Bayesian model averaging for logistic regression is employed. Using the Enterprise Surveys 2015 dataset for analysis, the Bayesian logistic regression approach provides robust findings on the importance of access to land, crime, and disorder as obstacles to FDI.