Earnings from gold mining in Australia remained tax‐exempt for almost seven decades until January 1, 1991. In the early 1980s, rapid economic prosperity induced by escalated gold prices brought the Australian gold‐mining industry under intense political scrutiny. Using a variant of the modified Jones model, this paper provides evidence of significant downward earnings management by Australian gold‐mining firms, which is consistent with their attempts to mitigate political costs during the period from June 1985 to May 1988. In contrast, test of earnings management over a similar period in a control sample of Canadian gold‐mining firms produced insignificant results. Further, empirical results are robust to several sensitivity tests performed. During the period from June 1988 to December 1990, the Australian firms were found to have engaged in economic earnings management. This is consistent with the sample firms' incentive of maximizing economic earnings immediately prior to the introduction of income tax on gold mining. The findings of this study help to understand the impact of earnings management on the efficient resource allocation in an economy. They also contribute toward understanding the linkage between regulation of accounting for special purposes and general‐purpose financial reporting.

Multiple-performance-measure agency models predict that optimal contracts should place greater reliance on performance measures that are more precise and more sensitive to the agent's effort. We apply these predictions to CEO retention decisions. First, we develop an agency model to motivate proxies for signal and noise in firm-level performance measures. We then document that accounting information appears to receive greater weight in turnover decisions when accounting-based measures are more precise and more sensitive. We also present evidence suggesting that market-based performance measures receive less weight in turnover decisions when accounting-based measures are more sensitive or market returns are more variable.

This article develops and estimates an on‐the‐job search model of the entry of highly skilled immigrants from the former Soviet Union into the Israeli labor market. The estimated parameters of the model, together with information on the wages of immigrants from earlier waves, imply that, on average, immigrants can expect lifetime earnings to fall short of the lifetime earnings of comparable natives by 57%. Of this figure, 14 percentage points reflect frictions associated with nonemployment and job distribution mismatch, and 43 percentage points reflect the gradual adaptation of imported schooling and experience to the local labor market.

Conservative financial policies are often criticized as serving the interests of managers rather than the interests of stockholders. We test this argument by examining the operating performance and other characteristics of firms that for a five-year period held more than one-fourth of their assets in cash and cash equivalents. Following the five-year period, operating performance of high cash firms is comparable to or greater than the performance of firms matched by size and industry or by a measure of proclivity to hold substantial cash. In addition, proxies for managerial incentive problems, such as ownership and board characteristics, are not unusual and do not explain differences in operating performance among high cash firms. We find that high cash holdings are accompanied by greater investment, particularly R&D expenditures, and by greater growth in assets. For firms that persistently hold large cash reserves, we conclude that such policies support investment without hindering corporate performance.

In this paper we investigate the claim that hedge funds offer investors a superior risk-return trade-off. We do so using a continuous time version of Dybvig's (1988a, 1988b) payoff distribution pricing model. The evaluation model, which does not require any assumptions with regard to the return distribution of the funds in question, is applied to the monthly returns of 77 hedge funds and 13 hedge fund indices over the period May 1990 - April 2000. The results show that as a stand-alone investment hedge funds do not offer a superior risk-return profile. We find 12 indices and 72 individual funds to be inefficient, with the average efficiency loss amounting to 2.76% per annum for indices and 6.42% for individual funds. Part of the inefficiency cost of individual funds can be diversified away. Funds of funds, however, are not the preferred vehicle for this as their performance appears to suffer badly from their double fee structure. Looking at hedge funds in a portfolio context results in a marked improvement in the evaluation outcomes. Seven of the 12 hedge fund indices and 58 of the 72 individual funds classified as inefficient on a stand-alone basis are capable of producing an efficient payoff profile when mixed with the S&P 500. The best results are obtained when 10-20% of the portfolio value is invested in hedge funds.

This study examines the linkage among the initial hypothesis set, the information search, and decision performance in performing analytical procedures. We manipulated the quality of the initial hypothesis set and the quality of the information search to investigate the extent to which deficiencies (or benefits) in either process can be remedied (or negated) by the other phase. The hypothesis set manipulation entailed inheriting a correct hypothesis set, inheriting an incorrect hypothesis set, or generating a hypothesis set. The information search was manipulated by providing a balanced evidence set to auditors (i.e., evidence on a range of likely causes including the actual cause ‐ analogous to a standard audit program) or asking them to conduct their own search. One hundred and two auditors participated in the study. The results show that auditors who inherit a correct hypothesis set and receive balanced evidence performed better than those who inherit a correct hypothesis set and did their own search, as well as those who inherited an incorrect hypothesis set and were provided a balanced evidence set. The former performance difference arose because auditors who conducted their own search were found to do repeated testing of non‐errors and truncated their search. This suggests that having a correct hypothesis set does not ensure that a balanced testing strategy is employed, which, in turn, diminishes part of the presumed benefits of a correct hypothesis set. The latter performance difference was attributable to auditors' failure to generate new hypotheses when they received evidence about a hypothesis that was not in the current hypothesis set. This demonstrates that balanced evidence does not fully compensate for having an initial incorrect hypothesis set. These findings suggest the need for firm training and/or decision aids to facilitate both a balanced information search and an iterative hypothesis generation process.

This paper investigates whether and how individual managers affect corporate behavior and performance. We construct a manager-firm matched panel data set which enables us to track the top managers across different firms over time. We find that manager fixed effects matter for a wide range of corporate decisions. A significant extent of the heterogeneity in investment, financial, and organizational practices of firms can be explained by the presence of manager fixed effects. We identify specific patterns in managerial decision-making that appear to indicate general differences in "style" across managers. Moreover, we show that management style is significantly related to manager fixed effects in performance and that managers with higher performance fixed effects receive higher compensation and are more likely to be found in better governed firms. In a final step, we tie back these findings to observable managerial characteristics. We find that executives from earlier birth cohorts appear on average to be more conservative; on the other hand, managers who hold an MBA degree seem to follow on average more aggressive strategies.

This paper examines whether mandatory auctions promote the efficient restructuring of distressed firms relative to a reorganization-based bankruptcy system such as Chapter 11. Under a mandatory auction system, aggressive bidding by a coalition of incumbent management and pre-bankruptcy creditors may deter outside bidders, may result in the coalition paying more than its valuation to acquire the firm, and may result in assets remaining in a lower value use. In a reorganization-based bankruptcy system, management's voluntary choice to seek an auction conveys information about the coalition's valuation, which facilitates competition. Our model shows that a reorganization-based bankruptcy system that encourages, but does not mandate auctions, can actually increase the likelihood that an outside bidder enters and the assets of the bankrupt firm are redeployed.