Adriana Korczak

Corporate ownership and the information content of earnings in Poland

In this article we test the influence of ownership structure on the information content of earnings in Polish-listed companies. Our investigation is based on the notion that in a weak corporate governance environment expropriation of private benefits of control is pervasive and manipulation of financial disclosure is a way to conceal those benefits to avoid disciplinary action. Concentrated ownership can act as a substitute for missing country-level corporate governance mechanisms to limit acquisition of private benefits of control, reducing incentives to mispresent financial situation and thus improving the quality of public accounting information. We find that weak country-level corporate governance mechanisms in the transition environment are best substituted by concentrated holdings of several investors rather than a single large shareholder. The information content of earnings increases when a few blockowners jointly hold between 25 and 50% of voting rights. We argue that the overall beneficial effects on corporate governance practices come from each blockholders incentives to protect themselves from being expropriated by managers and other blockholders. We also find a positive impact of managerial holdings on the information content of earnings, and we argue that the holdings effectively align managers’ and investors’ interests.

Does Cross-Listing Mitigate Insider Trading?

This paper examines whether the increased legal and reputational constraints associated with cross-listing in the U.S. reduces the propensity of insiders to trade on private information. We find that the directors in both domestic and cross-listed firms trade on private information, particularly when they sell their holdings, as their trades generate negative and significant abnormal returns regardless of the cross-listing level, and the post-event returns in exchange-listed and OTC-listed firms where the regulation is expected to be less binding are relatively similar. We also show that the impact of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX) is limited. These results provide weak evidence for the impact of cross-listing on the propensity of insiders to trade on private information.

The use of earnings and operations management to avoid credit rating downgrades

Firms placed on negative credit watch face the threat of a credit rating downgrade. At the same time, they are given the opportunity to put recovery efforts in place to retain their current credit rating. In this paper, we test to what extent firms use earnings management as a short-term recovery strategy. We find that both accruals-based and real earnings management are associated with firms avoiding credit rating downgrades, and that these alternative earnings management strategies tend to be complements rather than substitutes. However, following the passage of the Sarbanes–Oxley Act, only real earnings management is significantly associated with the credit watch outcome. We find evidence that firms which maintain their rating via earnings management are better able to afford the inevitable earnings reversals, and that in the year following the credit watch period, the credit rating performance of these firms is significantly better than firms which undergo a downgrade, with fewer downgrades and more upgrades in this period. Our results also imply that credit rating agencies are not misled by earnings management but rather allow for some discretion in reporting earnings that facilitates the dissemination of private information about future firm performance.

Political Uncertainty Exposure of Individual Companies: The Case of the Brexit Referendum

This paper studies cross-sectional determinants of the exposure of U.K. firms to Brexit, an event which resulted in an unprecedented rise in political uncertainty. We find that internationalization has a moderating effect on Brexit exposure which goes beyond the pure currency translation effect and is consistent with international activities acting as a diversification mechanism for domestic risks. We also provide some indicative evidence that high-growth firms are more affected by Brexit. At the industry level, we show that Financials and firms in the consumer-facing sectors have the highest exposure to Brexit-related uncertainty. Knowledge of the variation in exposure of individual firms and sectors to political uncertainty associated with major political events can assist managers, investors and policymakers in taking remedial actions to limit its impact.