A challenge for financial analysts and investors is teasing out how the stock returns of individual firms move with the changing conditions of their industry, and whether some are more sensitive to industry-wide news than others. Shengquan Hao, Qinglu Jin and Guochang Zhang explore this question by looking at the role of relative profitability in determining ... Read More

Electronic healthcare systems have the potential to improve patient care and save money. In the U.S. alone it is estimated such systems could save $77 billion if implemented properly, and the government has a goal of making all medical records electronic and standardized by 2014. But just because an e-healthcare system is in place does not mean it will be ... Read More

Companies that invest more or grow their total assets more are likely to experience a strange result: lower risk-adjusted returns. This outcome is called the investment or asset growth anomaly and it has attracted interest from researchers seeking an explanation. Two different schools of thought have emerged, one behavioral and the other rational. The ... Read More

Street earnings are used by analysts to track and forecast firm performance. Alongside these earnings are special items such as restructuring charges, profits or losses on asset sales, or asset write-downs or write-offs. When combined, they provide an opportunity for managers to frame their earnings, which has longer-term impacts on stock returns, according ... Read More

Mr Wong wants to get fit and decides to start running five kilometers a day, but after his first two kilometers, he is exhausted. Clearly the goal was too ambitious. What does he do now? The field of goal setting is of interest to consumer researchers who want to know not only how goals are set but how consumers set about striving towards them. To date, the ... Read More

Motivating employees is a perpetual goal for leaders. While leaders can work to inspire their teams in the hope of improving their effectiveness, there may be other factors getting in the way, such as poor relations among team members. Researchers have tended to look at one or the other outcome, rather than considering how motivating and demotivating factors ... Read More

Shareholder rights theoretically should lower the cost of capital by reducing overinvestment as well as investors' out-of-pocket monitoring costs and idiosyncratic risk. But evidence of these effects as so far has been mixed and somewhat surprising, suggesting that the predictions may not hold. One of the problems, say Kevin C.W. Chen, Zhihong Chen and K.C ... Read More

Cash flows, especially unanticipated ones, raise questions about how firms use these funds. Are they more likely to invest them? Pay dividends? Reduce debts? Do financially constrained firms use them differently from unconstrained firms? These questions are tested in a study by Sudipto Dasgupta, Thomas H. Noe and Zhen Wang that shows cash flows have both ... Read More

Flexibility has become a coveted attribute of organizations, who have been urged to deal with recent fluctuating demands in labor by hiring more "non-standard" workers such as those on temporary contracts. But what happens when standard and non-standard workers work together? Does this have negative or positive implications for the workers and the ... Read More

The mandatory application of International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) may help to level the playing field as far as accounting practices are concerned, but the transition to them also offers managers an opportunity to time equity issuance. This was the conclusion of research by Shiheng Wang and Michael Welker that looked at firms in 15 countries ... Read More