Litigation can be a costly process for firms. As such, the question of how the risk of securities class action lawsuits affects corporate decisions has drawn a great amount of research interest in accounting and finance literature. To measure ex ante litigation risk, previous studies have generally used industry membership, either alone or in conjunction ... Read More

Overconfidence among top managers may be “instrumental” to firm innovation, according to a pioneering new study of more than 6,000 U.S. and Chinese companies. Given the crucial role played by executives in every aspect of business operations, it is little wonder that their personalities affect firms’ decisions and performance. However, researchers have ... Read More

Debt covenants are an important monitoring mechanism that govern cash-flow rights and control rights between borrowers and lenders. Although it is believed that enforcement and property rights are primary determinants of a firm’s ability to write comprehensive contracts, there is currently little evidence supporting if or how these legal institutions affect ... Read More

Agriculture—the science of cultivating soil, growing crops, and raising livestock—is the primary economic sector of many developing economies throughout the world. Within this context, farmer producer organisations (FPOs) aim to combat poverty by reducing inefficiencies in agricultural markets. For example, FPOs work closely with farmers to integrate ... Read More

The real economic effects of financial reporting can be understood by looking into the joint effect of managerial overconfidence and accounting conservatism, specifically regarding the quality of corporate decisions. For instance, under what conditions does accounting conservatism improve corporate performance? Within the context of a firm, a chief executive ... Read More

Non-compete clauses in employment contracts are widely used in countries like the US to forbid certain employees, such as CEOs and specialised technicians, from working with the competition when their contract is terminated. The aim is to safeguard employers’ proprietary information and investment in human capital. But research by Tai-Yuan Chen, Guochang ... Read More

In recent years, there has been a rapid increase in the number of new technologies, tools, and platforms; for example, social networking, cloud computing, and data analytics. As such, IT projects that were developed for use in traditional client-server environments must now be deployed across these new platforms, be able to leverage big data, and have ... Read More

Exporting plays a significant role in the development of a firm, as can provide an opportunity to access knowledge from other sources, which can facilitate organizational learning. As such, governments in emerging markets (EMs) encourage exporting, as it is considered a key indicator of firms’ technological sophistication. That said, EM exporters often ... Read More

Existing studies into ordinal optimization fall into one of two categories: fixed budget or fixed confidence. With fixed budget, the aim is to minimize the probability of false selection given a sampling budget. In a fixed confidence setting, the target is to come up with a sampling procedure that satisfies a desired guarantee on the probability of false ... Read More

Before deciding to purchase a product, a consumer can access information via consumer reviews by customers who have already purchased the product. Consumer reviews are a form of customer feedback, but this information can also benefit firms. However, consumer-generated quality information (consumer reviews) relies on the volume of consumers who share their ... Read More