A tale of two perspectives: Australian risk management in theory and in practice

The objective of this thesis is to identify the gap between academic research in risk management and its implementation in practice. The thesis focuses on the application of Value-at-Risk (VaR) in managing market risk for Australian Authorised Deposit-taking Institutions (ADIs). It is found that the current regulation does not provide regulator enough information to assess the information content of VaR forecasts reported by ADIs and, therefore, its role to monitor risk-taking behaviours in ADI is limited

To what extent is earnings management practised in Malaysia?

The paper analyses the earnings management practices of Malaysian firms over the post-crisis period. We propose three dimensions of earnings management, namely earnings aggressiveness, loss avoidance and earnings smoothing, to empirically test a sample of public-listed firms on Bursa Malaysia. The impact of earnings management practices on stock market is then analysed in terms of cost of equity to reflect if it has a significant role in influencing stock returns. The results indicate the sporadic incidence of earnings management practices among sample firms and the influence of the practices on the Malaysian equity market is insignificant. Such results are mixed and not supported with those studies using developed countries especially with relations to the stock returns.earnings management; cost of equity; post-crisis; Malaysia; earnings aggressiveness; loss avoidance; earnings smoothing; stock markets; stock returns.