Earnings management in the aftermath of the zero-earnings discontinuity disappearance

The authors are thankful to the participants and discussants at the British Accounting and Finance Association Annual Conference 2016 at University of Bath and the BAFA Scottish Area Group Conference 2016 at University of Strathclyde for constructive comments. The authors also appreciate the useful comments by two anonymous reviewers on the early version of this paper.Peer reviewedPostprin

Gender diversity and earnings management: the case of female directors with financial background

Past evidence generally suggests that the presence of female directors on corporate boards tends to improve earnings quality due to these directors’ superior monitoring abilities. However, it is not clear which characteristics and skills of female directors drive such abilities. In this paper, we focus on the financial background of female directors, an area which remains largely unexplored in existing literature. The results show that the participation of female directors with relevant financial background improves earnings quality more than the participation of female directors without such background. In addition, our findings suggest that only female directors possessing relevant financial background and having fewer outside directorships are able to mitigate earnings management and therefore overcommitting expert female directors with more outside directorships would diminish their monitoring ability. We did not find any evidence suggesting that female directors without relevant financial background are able to mitigate earnings management, irrespective of their outside directorships or tenure. We interpret our findings within a theoretical framework that draws on a number of economic and social theories. The results are generally robust after controlling for potential endogeneity problems

External audit quality and firms' credit score

Using a sample of UK firms, we investigate whether external audit quality has an informational role for firms credit score. In our general research setting, we could not find any evidence on the association between firms’ credit score and external audit quality. However, when firms are suspected to be engaged in managerial misstatements, firms’ credit score seems to be associated with external audit quality. In particular, suspected firms get high credit score when they are audited by one of industry-specialised auditors. In addition, credit rating agencies penalise suspect firms when they pay high audit and non-audit fees

Buffer capital, loan portfolio quality and the performance of microfinance institutions: A global analysis

© 2019 Elsevier B.V. Using a sample of 625 microfinance institutions (MFI) across 40 countries from 2010 to 2015, we empirically examine the effect of buffer capital on the performance of MFIs and how this effect varies with loan portfolio quality. We find a negative relationship between buffer capital and MFIs’ performance. We further document that loan portfolio quality positively moderates the buffer capital-MFI performance relationship. We demonstrate that the buffer capital-loan portfolio quality relationship does not vary for deposit-taking, profit-making, and regulated MFIs. Our findings shed new light on the value relevance of capital in microfinance institutions. We use a novel approach to evaluate our results in light of the effects of omitted variable bias

Walking the Talk? A Corporate Governance Perspective on Corporate Social Responsibility Decoupling

Information asymmetry and the pressure to conform to stakeholders’ expectations cause firms to engage in corporate social responsibility (CSR) decoupling – a practice that has severe socioeconomic consequences for firms. Adopting a corporate governance perspective, this paper answers a novel question: whether board gender diversity (BGD) curbs CSR decoupling. Using a battery of sophisticated analyses and robustness tests on 9276 firm-year observations for the period 2002–2017, our results confirm that BGD is negatively associated with CSR decoupling. Analysis of the composition of gender-diverse boards further reveals that this effect is stronger for balanced boards than for skewed and tilted boards. Furthermore, we note that independent female directors are more effective monitors of decoupling than executive female directors. We also document that the relationship between BGD and CSR decoupling is stronger when the overall governance is weak. This implies that gender-diverse boards could act as a substitute mechanism for corporate governance that would otherwise be weak. Our study offers important theoretical and policy implications for the field of corporate governance and CSR

An inexpensive method of small paraffin tissue microarrays using mechanical pencil tips

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Tissue microarray technology has provided a high throughput means of evaluating potential biomarkers in archival pathological specimens. This study was carried out in order to produce tissue microarray blocks using mechanical pencil tips without high cost.</p> <p>Method</p> <p>Conventional mechanical pencil tips (Rotring Tikky II Mechanical Pencil 1.0 mm) were used to cut out 1 mm wax cylinders from the recipient block, creating from 36 to 72 holes. Three cores of tumor areas were punched out manually by using the mechanical pencil tips from donor paraffin embedded tissue blocks and transferred to the holes of the paraffin tissue microarrays.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>This technique was easy and caused little damage to the donor blocks. We successfully performed H&E slides and immunodetection without substantial tissue cylinder loss.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>Our mechanical pencil tip technique is the most inexpensive easy technique among the literature. It also takes a reasonable amount of time and reduces antibody consumption during immunohistochemistry</p

Rare Mucinous Colorectal Adenocarcinoma: Analysis of the Epidemiological Factors in Relation to Survival in Egyptian Patients

Colorectal carcinoma (CRC) is one of the leading causes of cancer related deaths; in Egypt it constitutes 6.5% of all cancers. Previous studies have shown conflicting results on clinicohistopathological features and survival of patients with colorectal mucinous (MA) and non-mucinous adenocarcinoma (NMA). To the best of our knowledge, this study is the first to investigate these features in Egypt. In this work, we studied tumor tissue specimens from 150 patients with colorectal MA and NMA who underwent radical surgery from Jan 2007 to Jan 2012 at Gastroenterology Centre, Mansoura University, Egypt. Their clinicohistopathological parameters and survival were analyzed using established statistical methodologies. Incidence of MA and its subtypes was much higher in Egypt than worldwide incidence. MA was significantly associated with younger age, more depth of invasion, lymph node metastasis, less microscopic abscess formation and less peri-tumoral lymphocytic response (Crohn-like response) than NMA. Both groups were not significantly different "among others" in other clinicopathological parameters including lymphovascular and perineural invasion, association with adenoma and schistosomiasis. Multivariate analyses for disease free and overall survival revealed that mucinous histology is an independent prognostic factor. Among several factors, only distant metastasis and presentation with recurrent disease were independent prognostic factors within MA patients. In conclusion, MA represents a distinct clinicopathological entity with worse survival than NMA. Distant metastasis and presentation with recurrent disease are independent prognostic factors. Further molecular investigations considering genetic features of MA will lead to drug development and better management

Is there a trade-off between accrual-based and real earnings management activities in the presence of (fe) male auditors?

Prior research suggests that the presence of high quality auditors (i.e. proxied by audit firm characteristics) constrains accrual-based earnings management, but it inadvertently leads to higher real activities manipulation. We investigate whether such trade-off exists between accrual-based and real earnings management activities in the presence of female or male auditors. We use a sample of UK firms for the period 2009 to 2016 and find that firms audited by female auditors do not resort to a higher level real activities manipulation when their ability to engage in accruals management is constrained. Overall, our results suggest that the benefits of hiring female auditors (i.e. less accrual-based earnings management) are overwhelmingly higher than the costs they might bring to the client firms (i.e. higher real activities manipulation).N/