During the year prior to management buyout (MBOs) announcements, some target firms exhibit abnormally high discretionary expenses in selling, general and administration, abnormally low discretionary accruals, and realize losses from asset sales. Higher discretionary expenses and losses from asset sales are associated with lower pre-MBO abnormal stock returns, especially for firms with higher in...

In this paper, we discuss three-stage models that control for exogenous, non-discretionary inputs in data envelopment analysis. In a recent article in this journal, Monte Carlo analysis was employed to compare and contrast alternative DEA models that measure efficiency in the presence of exogenous variables. The methodology for comparison was flawed, calling into question the results presented....

We investigate whether firms “lean against the wind”, i.e., manage earnings upward to offset aggregate (market wide) undervaluation, by examining how firm-specific measures of earnings management correlate with aggregate market conditions. Leaning against the wind has been proposed by prior research as a behavioral explanation for a negative contemporaneous relation and a positive predictive re...

We model the determination of management compensation through the strategic interaction among outside shareholders, managers, and corporate boards. The board sets both regular incentive compensation and discretionary special compensation unrelated to performance. We show that shareholder value maximising compensation plans may feature incentive compensation that is not monotone in performance a...

Relational contracts typically combine explicit terms that are third-party enforceable with implicit components that can be adjusted at the parties’ discretion. While discretionary ex post adjustments lies at the heart of relational contracting, previous empirical research has been primarily motivated by the repeat purchase mechanism (RPM) of Klein and Leffler (1981), which is a relational cont...

This study examines the role of pre-IPO discretionary accruals in the valuation and first day initial returns of IPOs. We find that IPO offer price is unaffected whereas market closing price is positively associated with the levels of pre-IPO discretionary accruals for issuers with aggressively reported earnings. We also find that this relative over-valuation of managed earnings by the markets ...

BACKGROUND Dietary sodium, the major source being salt, is associated with hypertension. Australian adults consume more than the recommended amount of salt and approximately 15% of dietary sodium comes from salt added at the table and during cooking. OBJECTIVE To determine the frequency of and the demographic characteristics associated with discretionary salt use. DESIGN A cross sectional s...

Amidst a struggling economy, organizations are ruled by the survival of the fittest paradigm but it is the employees who tend to pay the price, with increased demands which, oftentimes, fall outside their job scope. In the present paper, we examined whether pressuring people to engage in such organizational citizenship behaviors (OCB) might in fact backfire and lead to increased Counterproducti...

This paper presents a framework to plan organizational incentives for aligning usage behavior with organizational objectives across various IT adoption stages. Our framework is motivated by the introduction of incentive alignment as another dimension in Information Systems design (Ba et al., 2001) and is based on technology diffusion models presented in the literature. We focus in particular on...

This paper studies discretionary charges, which I define to be fees and levies that are collected at the discretion of local officials, as firm output distortions. I document that there is an inverted-U relationship between size of firms and discretionary charges paid by firms in China. I build a simple political economy model that captures interactions between firms and local officials. These ...