The study is an effort to fiind out the impact of earnings management on dividend payout policy for two coutries that is Pakistan and China. A set of listed Companies in both of the countries have been investigated to analyze the relationship for the year 2003 to 2007 in Pakistan and 2001 to 2007 in China. Dividend policy has been measured by dividend payout. Whereas earnings management has bee...

This study examines the role of pre-IPO discretionary accruals in the valuation and underpricing of IPOs. We find that IPO offer price is unaffected whereas market closing price is positively associated with the levels of pre-IPO discretionary accruals for issuers with aggressively reported earnings. We also find that this relative over-valuation of managed earnings by the markets explains a po...

Using a sample of banks, this study examines the capital market pricing implications of three components of loan fair values. We find that the nondiscretionary component is priced on a dollar-for-dollar basis, the discretionary component is assigned a significantly larger multiple than the nondiscretionary component and the noise component is not priced. This implies that the relevance and reli...

We examine how the criteria for choosing estimation samples (peer firms) affect the ability to detect discretionary accruals, using several variants of the Jones (1991) model. Researchers commonly estimate accruals models in cross-section, and define the estimation sample as all firms in the same industry. We examine whether firm size performs at least as well as industry membership as the crit...

Public servants are expected to be good stewards of resources, including the energy and environmental resources consumed in a public organization’s day-to-day operations. Many government organizations have enacted policies to mitigate the environmental impact of their operations. Even in the absence of formal policies, however, individual public employees might engage in a number of discretiona...

How people make choices about activity engagement during discretionary time is a topic of increasing interest to those studying quality of life issues. Assuming choices are made to maximize individual welfare, several factors are believed to influence these choices. Constraints theory from the leisure research literature suggests these choices are heavily influenced by intrapersonal, interperso...

Despite the fact that policymakers often have a short-term horizon and prefer discretionary over rule bound policy, one can observe policy reform with a focus on rules and long-term orientation. Sometimes reforms are driven by crisis, sometimes they are pursued in times of relative prosperity. The paper analyses reform processes theoretically under the assumption of imperfect knowledge. After t...

Behavioral dimensions of customer satisfaction with Vendor-Provided Information Services (VPIS) were investigated and three categories of satisfaction-related behaviors were identified:· (1) discretionary collaborative behaviors, (2) switching behaviors, and (3) contending behaviors. Of these three classes, discretionary collaborative behaviors appear to have the strongest relationship with sat...

We study discretionary non-cooperative monetary and fiscal policy stabilization in the New Keynesian model, where the fiscal authority uses distortionary taxes as policy instrument. We explicitly model different frequencies of fiscal and monetary policy operations. We find that standard models of monetary and fiscal policy interactions may substantially overestimate the social gain from the sta...

BACKGROUND Reducing salt intake in communities is one of the most effective and affordable public health strategies to prevent hypertension, stroke and renal disease. The present study aimed to determine the sodium intake in Hong Kong Chinese postmenopausal women and identify the major food sources contributing to sodium intake and urine excretion. METHODS This was a cross-sectional study amo...