This study examines the association between board composition and voluntary disclosure in annual reports. In particular, it addresses the incentives within the agency theory framework for both inside and independent directors to disclosure additional information voluntarily. Further, it provides evidence on the relation between the overall total voluntary disclosure and the components of voluntary disclosure, such as forward looking, strategic, non-financial and historical financial disclosures and board composition. Our sample is based on 181 Australian companies. We have developed and hand-collected 67 items from annual reports to develop the total voluntary disclosure index and the sub-indices of voluntary disclosure. Using two-stage multivariate analyses, our results provide some important insights. First, we find that there is a positive association between board composition and the voluntary disclosure of information in annual reports. Second, we also find that independent boards provide more voluntary disclosure of forward looking information and strategic information. However, board structure has no bearing on the voluntary disclosure of non-financial and historical financial information. Our findings are enhanced by different empirical specifications and sensitivity tests.

We examine whether firms that capitalize a higher proportion of their underlying intangible assets have higher analyst following, lower dispersion of analysts' earnings forecasts and more accurate earnings forecasts relative to firms that capitalize a lower proportion. Under Australian generally accepted accounting principles, capitalization of intangible assets has become increasingly 'routine' since the late 1980s. It is predicted that this experience leads Australian analysts to expect firms with relatively more certain intangible investments to signal this fact by capitalizing intangible assets. Our results are consistent with this. We find that capitalization of intangible assets is associated with higher analyst following and lower absolute earnings forecast error for firms with a stock of underlying intangible assets. Our tests suggest a weaker association between capitalization and lower earnings forecast dispersion. We conclude that there are benefits for analysts, for management to have the option to capitalize intangible assets. These findings suggest that IAS 38 Intangible Assets and AASB 138 Intangible Assets reduce the usefulness of financial statements.

0 ver the past decade, enterprise resource planning (ERP) system offerings from S N , Oracle, Peoplesoft, Baan, JD Edwards and others have become the dominant business information system software platform for large companies and government bodies in Anglo-American countries (Davenport, 1998).' In Australia, for example, a 1998 survey by the GartnerGroup, CFO magazine and the ASCPA found an average ERP usage rate of 52.7%, ranging from a high of 71.4% in manufacturing to a low of 29.6% in "other services" (Philipson 1999)? This trend reflects an earlier wave of adoption of ERP software in Europe and North America. This rise to dominance of ERP systems represents a fundamental shift in the nature of business information systems. Compared with the often in-housedeveloped legacy systems they have supplanted, EFP systems offer significantly increased sophistication, enabling integration of the software and underlying relational databases across all functional areas (accounting, human resources, operations and logistics, sales and marketing). This potentially allows the organisation to have a "seamless integration" of all the information flowing through it, and presents "managers who have struggled, at great expense and with great frustration, with incompatible information systems and inconsistent operating practices, the promise of an off-the-shelf solution to the problem of business integration" (Davenport 1998, p. 121).However, as Davenport and other commentators have noted, gaining such benefits is not without difficulties. ERP systems are complex software systems presenting major technical challenges and usually requiring large investments of time and money. More important, they confront the organisation with a significant management problem. To achieve their high level of integration, ERP systems have their own internal logic of "best practice" business processes. When implementing an ERP system, the organisation needs to reconcile the technical imperatives of the system with strategic and management needs. Unlike highly customised legacy systems, ERP systems require the This paper reports on the enteqbrise resource planning (ERP) systems experiences of Australian companies. I t examines the degree of information system integration and associated benefits that respondent companies believe they have achieved, and the impact of ERP systems on the adoption of new accounting practices.The results indicate that while ERP users report high levels of information integration for many functional areas, the pattern is similar to that of nonusers. Also, ERP systems seem to perform better in transaction processing and ad hoc decisionsupport than in sophisticated decision-support and reporting. Finally, ERP systems were found to have little influence on the use of new accounting practices.

The purpose of this article is to provide further insights into the adoption of enterprise resource planning systems (ERPS) and the impacts on organisational performance. It aims at challenging existing claims of ERP vendors with regards to the benefits of their products and at providing evidence of the benefits of bundling ERPS with supply chain management systems (SCMS). A survey was conducted to collect data on several aspects of organisational performance in companies which adopted ERPS, SCMS and the respective control groups. Financial key performance indicators were used to measure overall firm performance and the Supply-Chain Operations Reference (SCOR) model to operationalise performance at the business process (supply chain) level. Our key results contradict the claims of ERPS vendors insofar as we found no significant performance differences between ERPS adopters and non-adopters, neither at the core business process level, nor at the overall firm level. While we could confirm that, the longer the experience of firms with ERPS, the higher their overall performance, we found no evidence of a similar effect on business process (supply chain) performance. Only those ERPS adopters which also adopted SCMS achieved significantly higher performance at the business process level.

The gender pay gap generates significant political and social debate. This study contributes to this discussion by examining if a gender pay gap exists at the highest level of corporate management, the CEOs. While previous studies have documented a gender pay gap for most levels of executives the findings with respect to CEOs are conflicting. In this paper we focus only on CEO's as it is the most homogenous of executive roles and does not require us to assume that executives with similar titles undertake identical roles. Our evidence is based on 291 US firm-years for the period of 1998-2010. We do not find any association between CEO pay and gender using both the total sample and a sample matched using propensity scores to control for firm characteristics. These insignificant results hold for total pay, salary and bonuses, and for different matching procedures and econometric specifications. Our results therefore indicate that women who rise through the "glass ceiling" to the level of CEO are remunerated at similar levels to their male counterparts.

We examine the association between gender-diverse compensation committees and CEO pay and find that CEO compensation levels are negatively associated with gender-diversity of the compensation committee, but not gender-diversity of the board. Furthermore, we find that excess CEO compensation is negatively related to subsequent return on assets for firms with an all-male compensation committee but not for firms with a gender-diverse compensation committee. These results suggest that CEOs do receive some level of excess compensation which can be mitigated by having one or more females on the compensation committee.Keywords: Gender-diversity, compensation committee, CEO compensation 2 INTRODUCTIONThere is a global trend by policy makers and regulators to increase women on boards.Some European countries including Norway, Spain and France have sought to implement gender quotas, others use networking and mentoring programmes to quicken women's rise to the top. 1 The academic community has responded to this global trend by providing evidence on the differences between male and female directors, and/or the effect of gender-diversity on different corporate decisions. We build on this literature by investigating the economic consequences of gender-diversity in the context of CEO compensation. Specifically, our objectives are to provide evidence on: (i) the association between gender-diverse compensation committees and levels of CEO compensation, and (ii) the effect of genderdiverse compensation committees on the association between firm performance and 'excess' CEO compensation. 2This study contributes to the current debate on executive compensation levels and structures. Executive compensation levels have undergone renewed scrutiny following the global financial crisis and are criticised for encouraging excessive risk taking. 3 As a result, legislation has been proposed or enacted which restricts the level and proportion of the components of executive pay. 4 This study contributes to these professional debates by providing evidence on the association between firms with a gender-diverse compensation 1 Norway maintains a mandatory gender quota of 40%, Spain of 40% by 2015, and France is to introduce 50% by 2015. More recently, the European commission is seeking to implement a 40% female-quota for company boards across Europe, which is being opposed by eight countries including Britain, the Czech Republic, Hungary and Malta (Traynor 2012).2 'Excess' compensation is compensation above what can be explained by economic determinants (e.g. Core,Guay and Larcker

This study examines the economic and director-specific determinants of nonexecutive director (NED) compensation in the Australian setting. We find that NED compensation is associated with firm size, complexity, growth, risk and liquidity. It is also associated with director reputation, experience, connectedness and the directors' involvement with the firm. The additional compensation paid to the chairperson is positively associated with their prior experience and negatively associated with NED reputation and involvement. We find inconclusive evidence on the association between changes in NED compensation and firm performance.

The present study provides empirical evidence on the economic benefits of enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems. We use a modified value chain approach and identify several ratios for each component of the value chain to reflect improvements as a result of the adoption of ERP systems. These financial ratios are tracked for 2 years for a group of companies that adopted ERP systems versus a group of companies that did not adopt ERP. Both univariate and multivariate statistics are used to test for differences. The key result of the present study is that the adoption of ERP systems leads to sustained operational efficiencies and improved overall liquidity. In addition, some support is found for increased profitability 2 years after the adoption of ERP and for improvements in accounts receivable management.