This thesis examines anomalies related to the discretionary accruals usage during the tenures of CEOs in listed U.S. companies since the implementation of Sarbanes-Oxley Act. The approach used in this thesis is quantitative in nature. Four well-known discretionary accruals models: Healy model, DeAngelo model, Jones model and modified Jones are used in to separate discretionary accruals from the...

BACKGROUND The Health Star Rating (HSR) is an interpretive front-of-pack labelling system that rates the overall nutritional profile of packaged foods. The algorithm underpinning the HSR includes total sugar content as one of the components. This has been criticised because intrinsic sugars naturally present in dairy, fruits, and vegetables are treated the same as sugars added during food proce...

The effects of government R&D subsidies can vary across recipient firms, depending on the various characteristics a firm, potentially including firm's accounting information quality (AIQ). It has been well recognized that high AIQ helps to reduce asymmetry between investors and firms and, consequently, improves investment efficiency. However, there is lack clear understanding about specific rol...

The behaviors of heavy vehicles drivers in mandatory and discretionary lane changes are analyzed in this paper. 640 mandatory and 2,035 discretionary lane change events were extracted from a naturalistic driving database. Variations in gap acceptance and lane change duration were investigated. Statistical analysis showed that mandatory lane changes are more aggressive in gap acceptance and lane...

We examine whether a high wage–high employee intrapreneurial inputs model remains significant feature of the Russian economy. do so by estimating evolution ‘intrapreneurial’ contributions to companies in Russia, 1994–2015, using Akerlof's theory ‘partial gift exchange’. Akerlof (1982) suggests that discretionary organizational capacities rise when pay exceeds perceptions ‘fair’ comparable emplo...

A simple dynamic farm model is developed and used to analyse the net worth of a family farm grazing enterprise producing wool on the Northern Tablelands of New South Wales, Australia, under alternative assumptions regarding family expenses and investments in fertilizer. The linkage between family costs and expenditure on fertilizer is explored over a 25-year period highlighting the feed-back e€...

We investigate whether the positive associations between discretionary accrual proxies and beating earnings benchmarks hold for comparisons of groups segregated at other points in the distributions of earnings, earnings changes, and analystsbased unexpected earnings. We refer to these points as ‘‘pseudo’’ targets. Results suggest that the positive association between discretionary accruals and ...

Data envelopment analysis (DEA) is a non-parametric mathematical programming methodology used to not only evaluate the relative efficiencies of comparable decision making units (DMUs) with multiple inputs and outputs, but also provide efficiency targets for the DMUs. For a visualization of this method, see Figure 1. Since the incept of Charnes, Cooper and Rhodes (1978), DEA has gained increasin...