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"Graham, John"
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The book forger : the true story of a literary crime that fooled the world
London, 1932. Thomas James Wise is the toast of the literary establishment. A prominent collector and businessman, he is renowned on both sides of the Atlantic for unearthing the most stunning first editions and bringing them to market. Pompous and fearsome, with friends in high places, he is one of the most powerful men in the field of rare books. One night, two young booksellers - one a dishevelled former communist, the other a martini-swilling fan of detective stories - stumble upon a strange discrepancy. It will lead them to suspect Wise and his books are not all they seem. Inspired by the vogue for Hercule Poirot and Sherlock Holmes, the pair harness the latest developments in forensic analysis to crack the case, but find its extent is greater than they ever could have imagined. By the time they are done, their investigation will have rocked the book world to its core.
Book
Whose Man in Havana?
In Whose Man in Havana? the author offers an unconventional, often dark, but more often hilarious view of diplomacy in settings as varied as Haiti, London, the Dominican Republic, the Balkans, Palestine, Paraguay, Guyana, and Kyrgyzstan, including covert monitoring of Soviet military operations in Cuba on behalf of the CIA with the blessing of President Kennedy and Prime Minister Pearson. In a career that spans the Canadian foreign service and international organizations, he was fortunate to be in the right place at interesting, if turbulent, times. Throughout the book he has focussed on the lighter side of people and places, but almost everywhere the dark side intrudes. Graham makes plain that the intersection of the two is frequently black comedy.
eBook
Corporate Culture, Special Items, and Firm Performance
This study analyzes the relationship between corporate culture, the likelihood of reporting special items, and firm performance. We find a significant negative relation between corporate culture and special items using more than 55,000 firm-year observations from 6931 U.S. corporations between 2002 and 2021. The result suggests that firms with strong corporate cultures are less likely to use and report special items. Firms with lower performance mainly drive the negative relation; the pattern indicates that firms with weaker corporate cultures are prone to manage earnings using special items.
Journal Article
Financial Flexibility Prevalence Revisited with Evidence from South Africa
Financial flexibility occurs when companies borrow less than expected and is widely practiced. A commonly used model to establish the presence of financial flexibility is based on the determinants of the leverage model, which was developed some time ago and is composed of various factors that determine a company’s leverage use. Governmental borrowing and financial sector development in the meantime were shown to be key drivers of corporate borrowing. We add these two factors to the original model to establish how the prevalence of financial flexibility is affected by these inclusions into the model. South Africa is used as a locality for the study because of its relatively recent financial sector development and increased governmental borrowing. The results of the study show that financial flexibility is more prevalent when these factors are considered in a South African context. Previous studies have paradoxically shown a lower financial flexibility prevalence in South Africa when compared to a developed market such as the UK, which is contradictory to developing market debt conservatism. In this study, we show that when accounting for financial sector development and governmental borrowing, financial flexibility is widely prevalent in a South African context, at similar levels to that of a developed economy. The primary implication of the study’s findings is that financial flexibility may have been underreported in developed markets in prior studies.
Journal Article
CFO (Chief Financial Officer) Research: A Systematic Review Using the Bibliometric Toolbox
The chief financial officer (CFO) is a crucial executive position in an organisation, responsible for overseeing the financial operations and strategy of the company. Despite rising interest among academics and practitioners, the literature corpus on CFO research remains largely fragmented, which warrants the unpacking of the underlying intellectual knowledge structure of the domain. In response, this study aims to provide a concise overview of the trends and science relating to CFO research, comprehend potential gaps in the literature, and highlight crucial future research pathways. A quantitative bibliometric overview of 669 research articles from 1982 to 2022 provides a spectrum of intellectual clout that helps decipher performance trends and delineates six significant clusters of knowledge in CFO research. We selectively discuss the empirical findings and theoretical and conceptual advancements within each cluster. This study offers recommendations for future research, emphasising the growing role of CFOs in leadership and addressing the fragmentation in current research. The findings and contributions of this study could further elevate CFOs’ importance in the C-suite.
Journal Article
The Role of Tax Planning Incentives in the Use of Earnouts in Taxable Acquisitions
In an acquisition, an earnout is a component of transaction price that is contingent upon future events. Despite its usefulness to acquirers in mitigating valuation risk, using an earnout also has a potentially undesirable tax consequence for the acquirer because there is no immediate step-up in tax basis for the earnout portion of deal consideration until the resolution of associated contingencies. We thus hypothesize that acquiring firms with high marginal tax rates (MTRs) are less likely to use earnouts. We analyze a sample of taxable acquisitions by U.S. public companies, holding constant other non-tax determinants of earnout use from prior research, and we find results consistent with our prediction. We also find some evidence that strong tax incentives can offset the effect of target valuation uncertainty, suggesting that acquiring firms facing sufficiently high MTRs are willing to trade off mitigating valuation risk for a full, immediate step-up in tax basis. We contribute to the prior literature on determinants of earnout use as well as the role of tax planning incentives in firm choices within mergers and acquisitions.
Journal Article
Corporate Cash Holdings and Exposure to Macroeconomic Conditions
Determinants of a firm’s cash holdings have been a popular topic of research in finance, especially after the rapid surge in cash holdings for U.S. firms since the 1980s. The wide array of research has focused primarily on firm-specific factors to explain the cross-sectional variations but has found insufficient explanatory power for the variations in cash holdings. We incorporate variables for macroeconomic conditions and uncertainty with firm-specific variables. Using 19,223 firms with 213,663 firm-year observations from 1971 to 2019 and introducing five variables for macroeconomic conditions of the Aruoba–Diebold–Scotti index and three variables for macroeconomic and financial uncertainty, we find that a firm’s sensitivity to macroeconomic conditions and uncertainty plays important role in determining the level of cash holdings. We find supportive evidence from the robustness test with the firm’s age that variables for macroeconomic variables have an impact on the level of cash holdings irrespective of the firm’s age.
Journal Article
Capital Budgeting Practices: A Survey of Two Industries
This research examines the capital budgeting practices used by small and medium-sized firms (SMEs) in two Portuguese industries, footwear and metalworking, aiming at answering the following research questions: How much knowledge do managers have about capital budgeting practices? What are the most used practices? How much importance do they attribute to applying them? The research was conducted through an online survey with a response rate of 14.9%. The results document that most companies in both industries are familiar with capital budgeting practices, despite differences between the two. The footwear industry recognizes the importance of these indicators but makes little use of them, and many companies prefer using payback period (PBP). The metalworking industry, on the other hand, makes greater use of capital budgeting practices, with net present value being the favored indicator and PBP being used as supplementary. This study contributes to the capital budgeting literature in two ways: first, by focusing on SMEs instead of only large firms, and second, by exploring data from two industries rather than multiple, heterogeneous industries.
Journal Article