Essays on the role of narrative disclosures in financial reporting

This thesis contains two essays on the role of narrative disclosures in financial reporting. The first essay, “Tightening rating standards: The effect of narrative risk-related disclosures” (co-authored with Argyro Panaretou and Grzegorz Pawlina), examines how narrative disclosures affect rating stringency, a phenomenon where credit rating agencies assign ratings worse than what firm fundamentals justify. Results suggest that narrative disclosures about risk and uncertainty in Form 10-K reports moderate rating stringency. Moreover, this moderating effect is more pronounced when Form 10-K reports have textual attributes that can affect how users contextualize firm risk. The second essay, “Context matters: The role of fair value footnote narratives” (co-authored with Argyro Panaretou and Catherine Shakespeare), investigates how narrative disclosures in Form 10-K report footnotes that discuss the measurement of fair values affect investor uncertainty. The findings of this essay show that longer fair value footnote narratives reduce investor uncertainty for opaque fair values, and are particularly informative to sophisticated investors. Further test results suggest that standardized and non-specific fair value narratives increase investor uncertainty for Level 3 fair values, and that fair value narratives offer incremental information to investors relative to tabulated fair value footnote disclosures. Finally, the thesis includes a technical appendix, “A guide on extracting, processing, and operationalizing Form 10-K report narratives,” on the advantages and challenges in identifying, collecting, and integrating narrative disclosure data from Form 10-K reports into archival accounting studies

Dissolving the dichotomies between online and campus‑based teaching: a collective response to The Manifesto for teaching online

This article is a collective response to the 2020 iteration of The Manifesto for Teach-ing Online. Originally published in 2011 as 20 simple but provocative statements, the aim was, and continues to be, to critically challenge the normalization of education as techno-corporate enterprise and the failure to properly account for digital methods in teaching in Higher Education. The 2020 Manifesto continues in the same critically pro-vocative fashion, and, as the response collected here demonstrates, its publication could not be timelier. Though the Manifesto was written before the Covid-19 pandemic, many of the responses gathered here inevitably reflect on the experiences of moving to digi-tal, distant, online teaching under unprecedented conditions. As these contributions reveal, the challenges were many and varied, ranging from the positive, breakthrough opportunities that digital learning offered to many students, including the disabled, to the problematic, such as poor digital networks and access, and simple digital poverty. Regardless of the nature of each response, taken together, what they show is that The Manifesto for Teaching Online offers welcome insights into and practical advice on how to teach online, and creatively confront the supremacy of face-to-face teaching

Dissolving the dichotomies between online and campus-based teaching: a collective response to The manifesto for teaching online (Bayne et al. 2020)

This article is a collective response to the 2020 iteration of The Manifesto for Teaching Online. Originally published in 2011 as 20 simple but provocative statements, the aim was, and continues to be, to critically challenge the normalization of education as techno-corporate enterprise and the failure to properly account for digital methods in teaching in Higher Education. The 2020 Manifesto continues in the same critically provocative fashion, and, as the response collected here demonstrates, its publication could not be timelier. Though the Manifesto was written before the Covid-19 pandemic, many of the responses gathered here inevitably reflect on the experiences of moving to digital, distant, online teaching under unprecedented conditions. As these contributions reveal, the challenges were many and varied, ranging from the positive, breakthrough opportunities that digital learning offered to many students, including the disabled, to the problematic, such as poor digital networks and access, and simple digital poverty. Regardless of the nature of each response, taken together, what they show is that The Manifesto for Teaching Online offers welcome insights into and practical advice on how to teach online, and creatively confront the supremacy of face-to-face teaching

Corporate risk management and firm value:evidence from the UK market

The paper evaluates the effect of corporate risk management activities on firm value, using a sample of large UK non-financial firms. Following recent changes in financial reporting standards, we are able to collect detailed information on risk management activities from audited financial reports. This enables us to gain a better understanding of risk management practices and to investigate value implications of different types of hedging. Overall 86.88% of the firms in the sample use derivatives to manage at least one type of price risk. The hedging premium is statistically and economically significant for foreign currency derivative users, while we provide weak evidence that interest rate hedging increases firm value. The extent of hedging and the hedging horizon have an impact on the hedging premium, whereas operational risk management activities do not significantly influence the market value of the firm

Studies in corporate risk management

EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo

Risk Management with Options and Futures under Liquidity Risk ∗

Managing price risk with futures contracts creates liquidity risk through marking to market. Liquidity risk matters in an imperfect capital market where interim losses on a futures position have to be nanced at a borrowing rate that is higher than the risk-free rate. However, the impact of liquidity risk can be mitigated using options on futures. This paper analyzes the optimal risk management and production decisions of a risk-averse rm that faces joint price and liquidity risk and can trade derivatives in unbiased markets. Its main contribution is to provide a rationale for the use of futures and options on futures in imperfect capital markets for risk management purposes. The analytical results show that there is a hedging role for option on futures: If liquidity risk materializes, the rm sells options on futures in order to partly cover this liquidity need. The additional exposure to price risk created by the options position is partly o set by an adjustment of the futures position. Otherwise, no options are traded and the optimal futures position is a full hedge. Numerical results show that the existence of liquidity risk reduces the optimal futures hedge ratio and that options are not normally used before a liquidity need actually arises. The paper also provides comparative statics results