This study employs Danish data to examine the empirical relationship between the proportion of managerial ownership and two characteristics of accounting earnings: the information content of earnings and the magnitude of discretionary accruals. In previous research concerning American firms, Warfield et al. (1995) document a positive relationship between managerial ownership and the information content of earnings, and a negative relationship between managerial ownership and discretionary accruals. We question the generality of the Warfield et al. result, as the ownership structure found in most other countries, including Denmark, deviates from the US ownership configuration. In fact, Danish data indicate that the information content of earnings is "inversely" related to managerial ownership. Copyright Blackwell Publishers Ltd 2002.

This paper provides evidence that keiretsu group member firms are subject to lower effective tax rates than independent firms in Japan. As one explanation for this phenomenon, we develop a hypothesis that keiretsu firms strategically shift financially reported income among affiliates in order to reduce overall effective tax rates. Empirical evidence supports this income-shifting hypothesis since the positive relationship between pretax return on firm value and marginal tax rate status is significantly mitigated by keiretsu membership. Further, it appears that keiretsu income shifting activities intensify when Japanese firms face economic recession, contrasting conjecture of weakening strength of keiretsu affiliation during this period. We also find evidence supporting the view that benefactors of shifted income are compensated via increased dividends.

This paper provides evidence that uncontested director elections provide informative polls of investor perceptions regarding board performance. We find that higher (lower) vote approval is associated with lower (higher) stock price reactions to subsequent announcements of management turnovers. In addition, firms with low vote approval are more likely to experience CEO turnover, greater board turnover, lower CEO compensation, fewer and better-received acquisitions, and more and better-received divestitures in the future. These findings hold after controlling for other variables reflecting or determining investor perceptions, suggesting that elections not only inform as a summary statistic, but incrementally inform as well.

We study whether board gender diversity (BGD) affects corporate risk strategies. Specifically, we investigate the association between BGD and firms’ reputation risk and financial risk. Using S&P data from 1997 to 2013, we find that BGD is negatively associated with tax avoidance, suggesting firms with gender‐diverse boards are more cautious about potential reputation risks associated with aggressive tax strategies. However, we find that BGD is positively associated with firms’ financial risk. The combined findings illustrate that BGD aligns a firm's risk exposure closer to risk‐neutral shareholders’ preferences by reducing reputation risk exposure while enabling necessary financial risk exposure.