Issue #2 (cont. 1) (Volume 14 2017)

Due to the uniqueness of mandatory restatements, this paper examines whether family dominance affects the relationship between mandatory restatements and management turnover in an emerging economy – Taiwan. This paper adopts logistic regression models along with reporting the marginal effect of all explanatory variables to examine management turnover in different years around the year of mandatory restatement announcement. The findings show that family directorship weakens the positive relationship between mandatory restatements and management turnover in one year after the year of mandatory restatement announcement whereas do not show that family shareholding can affect the above relationship in any observed years. The findings have essential policy implications for security regulators and firms to strengthen family governance practices and financial reporting quality.

Following the global financial crisis in 2008, many countries have introduced economic and corporate reforms to assure fair markets and mitigate the risk of management misconduct. In this context, Kuwait has implemented two new major laws to restructure its capital markets and improve corporate governance. The two laws ere the Capital Market Authority Law (CMAL) and Kuwait Companies Law (KCL). In this paper, the authors sought answers to two questions: (1) has the performance of the listed companies changed in response to the enforcement of the laws? and (2) was there a direct influence of the laws on that change? The authors found some evidence of significant change in performance. Moreover, they provide evidence of KCL viability as a determinant of better performance. Interestingly, CMAL was found to be inadequate for improving firm performance. Implications and recommendations for further research are provided.

The asset management sector is constantly looking for a reliable investment strategy, which is able to keep its promises. One of the most used approaches is the target volatility strategy that combines a risky asset with a risk-free trying to maintain the portfolio volatility constant over time. Several analyses highlight that such target is fulfilled on average, but in periods of crisis, the portfolio still suffers market’s turmoils. In this paper, the authors introduce an innovative target volatility strategy: the discontinuous target volatility. Such approach turns out to be more conservative in high volatility periods. Moreover, the authors compare the adoption of the VIX Index as a risk measure instead of the classical standard deviation and show whether the former is better than the latter. In the last section, the authors also extend the analysis to remove the risk-free assumption and to include the correlation structure between two risky assets. Empirical results on a wide time span show the capability of the new proposed strategy to enhance the portfolio performance in terms of standard measures and according to stochastic dominance theory.

Currently, indirect taxes in the EU are highly harmonized, however, harmonization of direct taxes is still a very complex problem. Many EU member states refuse to give up their tax sovereignty, which would become considerably limited because of the har¬monization of direct taxes. Today, attention is paid to the harmonization of the tax base of corporate income tax, while a number of ways are under consideration. The European Council has issued a draft of Directive for a common consolidated tax base of corporate income tax in 2011 and updated in 2012. This draft must be approved by all member states, but some of them, however, have expressed on the draft in negative way. Because of the severity of this problems, the authors decided to focus on this topic within this article, which deals with the calculation of the tax base by the laws of the Slovak Republic and by Common Consolidated Corporate Tax Base (CCCTB); and evaluate whether the tax harmonization of direct taxes would be advantageous for the particular business.

VIX, a ticker symbol for Volatility Index, measures the implied annual volatility of at-the-money SP500 Index Options. Conventional wisdom presumes VIX to measure the magnitude (positive or negative) of possible movements in future equity prices, with movements being a positive function of VIX. This research investigates the nature of the relationship between VIX and SP500 volatility, and answers the question as to whether that relationship is linear or nonlinear. Based on this research paper, the authors conclude that the realized SP500 volatility is nonlinear, and grows with the level of VIX at an increasing rate. The nonlinearity relationship between VIX and SP500 has enormous implications for investment management and hedging in the financial markets.

The authors of this article, based on the principle of legitimacy, state that tax authorities in tax proceedings protect not only the fiscal interests of the state as a priority, but at the same time they are obliged to maintain the rights and legitimate interests of the taxable entities, analyze the current legislation of the tax audit in aspect of permissible statutory length of its duration and its impact on the process of refund of excess remission of VAT to the taxable entities.

The level of insured losses from natural and man-made disasters occurred in the world from 2012 to 2016 did not exceed 30-45%. Therefore, it is necessary to study another perspective source of financing losses refunding from natural and man-made disasters. The objective of this research is to consider financing losses from natural and man-made disasters by use of crowdfunding, especially in emerging countries. It was defined that the most appropriate model of crowdfunding for financing losses from natural and man-made disasters is donation model with reward-based and donation-based business models. Stimulus for individuals to take part in crowdfunding for financing losses from natural and man-made disasters can be different depending on their location and business model. Sets of assessments based on four categories of questions and method of results visualization were used to examine a country’s readiness for crowdfunding on the example of Ukraine. Complete level of Ukraine’s readiness for crowdfunding was defined. It shows that reward-based crowdfunding is the first stage towards crowdfunding implementation and development. Further research should be done to investigate the mechanism of using a tax discount in case of implementation of the reward-based crowdfunding for financing losses from natural and man-made disasters.

This study uses analyst recommendations and three ambiguity proxies, namely ambiguity in fundamentals, ambiguity in information and market ambiguity, to examine market reaction to recommendation changes in the Taiwanese stock market. The authors find that analysts’ recommendation changes have positive effects on subsequent buy-and-hold abnormal returns when market ambiguity is moderate. When ambiguity in fundamentals is low, recommendation changes have a positive influence on smaller firms. The effect of ambiguity in information on stock returns is associated with market ambiguity; market ambiguity is negatively associated with abnormal returns for firms with moderate ambiguity in fundamentals. Investors in a small firm rely more on analyst recommendations.

The study investigates the relationship between organizational culture and organization commitment at a higher education institution in South Africa. Quantitative research approach was used and 30 participants were chosen at random from academic and non-academic employees of the university. Furthermore, in order to gather data, the study used a structured questionnaire regarding the effects of existing organizational culture on organizational commitment. Pearson correlation analysis was used to determine the relationship between existing organizational culture typologies and facets of organizational commitment. The study revealed that different culture typologies bring about different levels of organizational commitment. Moreover, support of culture had a strong significant relationship with normative and continuance commitment. This means that if the organization shows the sense care and support to its employees, they will develop an obligatory sense of belonging and help the organization in attaining its objectives.

This paper has proposed a specific case in the property and real estate sector regarding the impact of ownership structure and corporate performance, since this sector is one of those with booming investment in Indonesia. The ownership structure was represented by the institutional investor and managerial ownership, and the Economic Value Added (EVA) and Tobin’s Q were used as a proxy for firm performance. This study utilized the purposive sampling of 240 observations over the period 2010-2015. The fixed and random effect panel data model was employed to determine the relationship among the variables. Findings show that the institutional investor and company’s size, as well as debt ratio, are important in explaining firm performance, while managerial ownership has a partially significant effect on the performance of companies in this industry.

The purpose of the current paper is to elaborate a model to forecast a particular type of earnings management by companies: upward earnings management, downward earnings management or the absence of significant manipulation.
The sample analyzed in the current paper comprises 664 Russian and 2,380 Chinese public companies for the period 2009-2014. The forecast was made for 2014 based on annual accounting data for 2009-2013. Regression analysis, as well as Classification and Regression Tree modelling (CART), were used. The data forecast for 2014 was compared with actual data for that year, and the accuracy of the forecasting model was assessed.
The paper outlines the main conditions under which a particular type of earnings manipulation is expected to take place in a company in the accounting period following the current one. It is shown that the main factor influencing the company’s level of earnings manipulation of the next accounting period for both Russian and Chinese companies is the debt ratio calculated as the ratio of total liabilities to total assets. The other important factors are: the company size, return on equity, earnings persistence, the level of earnings manipulation in the current period and stock emission.

Various measures of resemblance are increasingly applied in confrontation of data samples obtained by different sources. Semblance analysis aims at comparison of two sets of data based on their phase and frequency. Conventional semblance analysis following the Fourier transform has several deficiencies resulting from the transform. To overcome these obstacles, another type of semblance analysis was developed applying the wavelet transform. This paper focuses on semblance analysis of stock prices and government bond yields of two major global economies using continuous wavelet transform regarding both scale and time.