Fair value accounting in Sri Lanka: auditors' perception of usefulness and awareness, and challenges faced by audit procession

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Australian specific bank features and the impact of income diversification on bank performance and risk

Since financial market deregulation, Australian banks have significantly diversified from a dependence on simple products such as interest-bearing loans to a broader range of financial products services. Such initiatives have transformed the structure of the Australian banking industry and are destined to receive scrutiny following the announcement of Australia's financial services inquiry. Against the common view that attempts by firms to diversify can be expected to impact negatively on financial performance, we find no strong evidence to suggest that diversification has been unfavourable to the performance of Australian banks. We find rather that Australia's banks have improved their risk-return profiles as an outcome of diversification

The association between dividend payout and firm growth: Australian evidence

We report that whereas firms with high earnings distributions tend to have low-to-moderate growth (consistent with conventional theory), firms with low earnings distributions run the range between high and low performers. We interpret our findings for firm growth and payout policy in relation to the firm's location on the Boston Consulting Group (BCG) matrix that combines high/low growth with high/low market share. Our findings suggest that the market has difficulty in distinguishing between these types of firms. A concern is that investor preferences as an outcome may be focussed on dividend-paying firms at the expense of younger growing firms in need of retained earnings

Bank diversification, performance and stockmarket response: Evidence form listed public banks in South Asian countries

Our concern in the present paper is with the financial viability of banks in the recently liberalised economies of the South Asian region as they have diversified their revenue and assets bases. To this end, we examine how stock markets have responded to bank diversification in this region over the period start-1999 to end-2012. We find that when banks diversify from interest-only income, they achieve higher market-to-book valuations and improved solvency, but only up to a point, beyond which these performance indicators are negatively associated with higher levels of diversification. It appears that a continued diversification of assets bases away from traditional loan assets does not of itself imply an improved market performance. We explore these issues in the context of four South Asian countries (Bangladesh, India, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka)