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Abstract :
[en] The thesis is divided in the following three chapters:
Chapter 1 analyzes firms’ tone in risk disclosure using a sample of listed firms in the European Economic Area from 2002 to 2016. Firstly, findings show that firms, on average, use more negative than positive words in risk disclosure. This linguistic negativity bias has increased over time, suggesting that efforts to discourage companies’ propensity for overly positive risk disclosure had been potentially effective. Secondly, this negativity bias in tone increases more when receiving bad news than it decreases when receiving good news. Chapter refers to this phenomenon as ‘conditional risk disclosure tone conservatism’. Thirdly, we show that risk tone conservatism and stock price crash risk are negatively associated within a certain range of accounting conservatism.
Chapter 2 aims to advance the understanding of the generic firm characteristics and to provide a meta-analysis of the relationship between generic firm characteristics and stock price crash risk. It analyzes the existing findings of the relationship between firm size, investor heterogeneity, growth, leverage, financial performance, volatility, earnings management and crash risk across 99 prior empirical studies. In addition, it investigates the potential covariates that moderate the variation in the results. Meta-analysis is used to investigate and aggregate the association between generic firm characteristics and stock price crash risk. Meta-regression analyses are conducted to examine whether potential moderators affect this association. Findings indicate that firm size, investor heterogeneity, and growth opportunities have a significant positive association with crash risk. However, leverage has a negative significant relationship with crash risk. Meta-regression results show that the variation in the firm characteristics and crash risk relationship is moderated by the measurement of generic determinants, publication status, citations, journal ranking, countries, financial sector and crisis period inclusion in the sample of studies, author’s country, position, and gender.
Chapter 3 shows that Communist Party Committee (CPC) involvement in corporate governance is a determinant of the asymmetric behavior of selling, general, and administrative (SG&A) costs in Chinese state-owned enterprises (SOEs). SOEs having CPC direct control show a higher level of asymmetric cost behavior. In addition, the moderating effect of regional institutional quality on the relationship between CPC involvement and cost asymmetry is examined. Results indicate that firms located in regions with strong market-based institutions exhibit a stronger association between CPC direct control and cost asymmetry, thus the CPC counteracts pressure from markets to cut costs. This chapter contributes to the cost asymmetry literature by introducing a new political determinant that is specific to the growing Chinese market, CPC direct control.