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We examine the role that secondary mathematics plays in the performance of students in introductory business courses. Students who pass more advanced secondary mathematics subjects perform significantly better in introductory business courses. This 'mathematics effect' is significantly stronger than the effect of other business-related secondary subjects, such as economics or accounting. Our findings also confirm previous studies showing that secondary accounting is beneficial for studying first-year tertiary accounting. Interestingly though, we find that studying secondary economics can detract from a student's introductory tertiary results in some courses. Our findings have implications for educators and administrators as well as current secondary students. Copyright (c) The Authors. Journal compilation (c) 2008 AFAANZ.

We examine the determinants of debt maturity in the Australian capital market with the Top 400 firms listed on the Australian Securities Exchange for the period 1989-2006. We find that Australian firms not only exhibit a positive leverage-maturity relationship but also use short-term debt to signal their high quality to the market. Our results are robust to different estimation methods that control for endogeneity and error-dependence. We also find that ignoring the interaction between leverage and maturity can lead to erroneous conclusions about the support for the matching principle, the agency costs hypothesis and the transaction costs hypothesis.

This study extends the literature on the relationship between recent performance and the movement of managed funds' assets by investigating the effects of fund size and age. The results confirm a size effect, as well as an age effect. Tests distinguishing between the two favor a size rather than an age interpretation. The evidence that flows of small funds are more sensitive to recent performance than flows of large funds is consistent with Gruber's (1996) notion of sophisticated investors using information in past performance to identify superior funds. Zheng's (1998) evidence that the good performers tend to be small funds suggests that the smart money should be following small funds, as confirmed in this study. Support for the 'smart money size effect' is also provided here with evidence confirming that small funds tend to be superior performers. Copyright Blackwell Publishers Ltd 2002.