This article examines the relation between gender diversity and earnings quality for Australian firms from 2005 to 2013. We draw on the work of Kanter, highlighting the importance of the proportion of women on the board when measuring diversity. We show that all-male and skewed boards have lower earnings quality while that of tilted and balanced boards is higher. In addition, a critical mass of women is achieved when some 30% of directors are females. Performance and risk do not influence the relation. We contribute by presenting evidence supporting critical mass theory. Furthermore, our work adds to the recent debate on whether the association between gender diversity and earnings quality is U-shaped, rather than linear. Our results have implications for regulation and practice. We identify the need for a critical mass of women, rather than tokens, to enhance earnings quality.

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We investigate whether the flexibility in making contributions towards defined benefit pension plans sponsored by firms in the United States allows managers to save cash and increase investments. Firms invest more at higher levels of pension deficit, defined as pension benefit obligations less pension assets, and scaled by total assets. At the median level (90 th percentile) of pension deficit, investments increase by 6.7 cents (9.4 cents) for every dollar increase in cash. As the pension deficit increases, firms deviate more from the predicted level of investment. These findings suggest that the incremental investments are more likely to represent overinvestment by managers. Our results are robust to alternative model specifications and endogeneity concerns that may arise if investments are jointly determined with the funding policy of pension plans and the firm's target cash level. We repeat our main analysis for the United Kingdom and also find for that country that, at a fixed cash level, total investment increases as pension deficit increases.

In this article, we provide an insight into Asia-Pacific banks’ market, interest rate and exchange rate exposures using a market-based model, pre and post the Asian financial crisis. Our study provides a unique comparative analysis across 10 countries, for both short-horizon and long-horizon risk exposures. Overall, our findings reveal that bank portfolios in countries that are harder hit by the Asian crisis have higher market and short-term interest rate exposures post-crisis. With long-horizon returns, there are a larger number of significant interest rate (IR) and exchange rate (ER) exposures, which are consistent with the prior literature that long-horizon return measures economic exposures that are difficult to hedge. When the long-horizon regressions with an error correction model are carried out, the results obtained support the short-horizon results. Among the country groups, the newly industrialized economies display the greatest sensitivity to IR and ER changes during the post-Asian crisis period. Investigating bank regulation effects, we find evidence that bank portfolios that experience lower restrictions on their activities and ownership, and greater private monitoring have lower market risk.