This paper investigates whether publicly‐quoted firms which become closely held via management buyouts possess characteristics prior to the change which differentiate them from firms which remain publicly‐quoted. Discriminant analysis procedures are used to test for group differences and to identify the attributes which contribute most to differences. The results indicate that firms becoming closely held through management buyouts possess certain financial statement and stock market characteristics which are significantly different from firms remaining publicly‐quoted.

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This paper investigates whether publicly held firms which change to private ownership through management buyouts (ex‐public firms) possess characteristics prior to the change which differentiate them from firms which remain publicly owned. The financial characteristics of ex‐public firms for the year immediately prior to going private were analyzed. A multivariate framework was developed to determine which attributes best distinguished firms going private via management buyouts from similar firms not going private. A discriminant function was developed using seven ratios: (1) concentration of ownership, (2) cash flow to net worth, (3) cash flow to total assets, (4) price/earnings ratio, (5) price/book value ratio, (6) book value of depreciable assets in relation to original costs, and (7) dividend yield. The model demonstrated a classification accuracy of 77.8 percent for the original sample and 81.4 percent in a hold‐out sample validation. These findings imply that financial characteristics alone provide a means by which firms going private via management buyouts can be separated from others. Therefore one can argue that, regardless of the stated motive for going private, financial characteristics either are explicit decision variables or directly reflect non‐financial reasons for management buyouts.

Despite popular portrayals of women's current success in public accounting, labor force statistics indicate that few women advance to partnership-level positions. Accounting research on the scarcity of female partners tends to approach this issue from a person-centered perspective and to focus on characteristics of women as an explanation for their occupational status. This article demonstrates that a situation-centered perspective provides a useful contribution in understanding the scarcity of women partners. The findings are based on a survey of 188 male and 184 female accountants.

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