Private Equity Returns and Disclosure Around the World

To obtain more funds from the institutional investors, private equity (PE) fund managers may report inflated valuations of private investee companies that are not yet sold. However, such overvaluations may result in a reputational cost when those investments are realized. Using evidence from 39 countries, we show that there are significant systematic biases in managers' reporting of fund performance. We find that these biases depend on the accounting and legal environment in a country, and on proxies for the degree of information asymmetry between institutional investors and PE fund managers.</p

Monitoring intensity and stakeholders' orientation: How does governance affect social and environmental disclosure?

The aim of the paper is to investigate the effects of the corporate governance model on social and environmental disclosure (SED). We analyze the disclosures of the 100 U.S. Best Corporate Citizens in the period 2005–2007, and we posit a series of simultaneous relationships between different attributes of the governance system and a multidimensional construct of corporate social performance (CSP). We consider both the extent and the quality of SED, with the purpose of identifying increasing levels of corporate commitment to stakeholders and shedding some light on whether SED is used as a signal or rather as a legitimacy tool. Our empirical evidence shows that the stakeholders’ orientation of corporate governance is positively associated with CSP and SED. On the other hand, we do not find support for the monitoring intensity of corporate governance being negatively associated with social performance. We also find that CSP in the “product” dimension is positively associated with the extent and quality of SED whilst CSP in the “people” dimension is negatively associated with the extent and quality of SED. At a time when shareholders and stakeholders share more common aspects in their relationships with firms, this is a significant area to explore and this research fills an important lacuna in this respect

Analysis of the fragmentation properties of quark and gluon jets at the CERN SPS pp̄ collider

A sample of two-jet events from the UA1 experiment at the CERN pp̄ Collider has been used to study the fragmentation of high-energy quark and gluon jets into charged hadrons. Compared with lower-energy jets observed in e+e- and pp collisions, the fragmentation function measured in the present experiment is softer (i.e. peaked to smaller values of z) and the mean internal transverse momentum is larger, mainly because of the effects of the QCD scaling violations. Using our knowledge of the quark and gluon structure functions in the proton, together with the QCD matrix elements, a statistical separation of quark and gluon jets is achieved within the present experiment. The fragmentation function for the gluon jets is found to be softer, and the angular spread of the fragmentation products larger, than is the case for quark jets. © 1986