Audit committee and internal audit and the quality of earnings: empirical evidence from Spanish companies

Corporate scandals and failures such as Enron, WorldCom, etc. were highly catastrophic and had a terrible effect on stakeholders. The pressure of globalisation and the intense competition have lead to organisations encouraging good corporate governance. Organisations have to promote transparency and accountability of financial information. As Gramling et al. (J Account Lit 23:194–244, 2004) argued there are four important mechanisms of corporate governance include boards of directors, audit committees (among others) and internal and external audit functions. However, this paper will focus on the relationship between two corporate governance mechanisms (audit committee and internal audit function). Thus, our purpose is to analyse the relation between characteristics of the audit committee and internal audit function and earnings management measured as abnormal accruals to test the quality of financial statements. We hypothesise that the association between the effectiveness of the audit committee and the presence of an internal audit function and its relationship with this committee would indicate less opportunity for management to manipulate earnings. Using a sample of 108 non-financial Spanish companies that traded on the Madrid Stock Exchange between 2003 and 2006 (432 observations), we have found that the size and number of meetings of the audit committee had a significant negative association with earnings manipulations. Also, our results suggest that a negative relation between having an internal audit function and earnings management.     

Child Sexual Abuse,Sexual Anxiety,and Sexual Satisfaction: The Role of Self-Capacities

Research indicates that child sexual abuse produces lasting alterations in interpersonal relatedness, identity, and affect regulation, often referred to as self-capacity disturbance. Child sexual abuse also has been shown to negatively impact sexual functioning. This study examined the role of altered self-capacities in mediating the relationship between child sexual abuse and sexual responses. Path analysis revealed that child sexual abuse was related to sexual anxiety and decreased sexual satisfaction through its association with reduced self-awareness and a propensity to be involved in difficult interpersonal relationships.     

Bivariate distributions with second kind beta conditionals

In this paper the most general bivariate distributions with second kind beta conditionals is fully characterized. This family is closed under inversions and the conditional moments are shown to be rational functions of the conditioned variable. Two subfamilies of dependent distributions is shown to have second kind beta marginals too. Finally, as a particular case, the most general bivariate distribution with second kind Pareto conditionals is characterized.     

Prompting Depression Treatment Seeking among Smokers: A Comparison of Participants from Six Countries in an Internet Stop Smoking RCT

Websites containing information and advice about health are increasingly common and popular. It is important to understand whether the material these sites contain can positively influence individual behavior, and whether populations differ in their response to that material. Participants in an international web-based stop smoking randomized controlled trial (RCT) were screened for major depression; participants whose history and/or depression symptoms were deemed of concern were offered one of two prompts (Strong and Mild) to seek treatment, depending on depression history. Participants from 3 predominantly English-speaking and 3 predominantly Spanish-speaking countries were analyzed. Individuals given a Strong prompt were more likely to seek treatment for depression than those given a weak prompt (16.6% vs. 10.2% of previously untreated individuals reported seeking treatment), controlling for symptom level and other variables. Country-specific differences were observed, with participants from South Africa and Spain departing from the common pattern of Strong prompt leading to higher likelihood of treatment seeking. Older age and female gender, but not symptom level predicted higher likelihood of seeking treatment following a prompt. The results suggest that information provided by the health websites can promote help seeking in affected individuals.     

On choosing between two nonlinear models estimated robustly. Some Monte Carlo evidence

The article considers the problem of choosing between two (possibly) nonlinear models that have been fitted to the same data using M-estimation methods. An asymptotically normally distributed test statistic that takes into account the fact that the models are fitted robustly is given. The new procedure is compared with other test statistics using a Monte Carlo study. We found that the presence of a competitive model either in the null or the alternative hipothesis affects the distributional properties of the tests, and that in the case that the data contains outlying observations the new procedure had a significantly higher power than the rest of the tests.     

Justice as social representation: diffusion and differential positioning / La justicia como representación social: difusión y posicionamientos diferenciales

The aim of this paper is to analyse the relationship between the diffusion process of social representations of justice by the press and their appropriation by readers. Two simultaneous cross-sectional studies were carried out. Study 1 analysed the meaning and the frequency of the word justice in the most important newspaper in Buenos Aires. The results indicate that the representation of justice has a retributive and institutional meaning. Study 2 investigated university students’ social representations of justice (N = 404) through a word association technique. The results showed that the central core of social representation has a retributive and institutional meaning, similar to the representations diffused by the most important newspaper. Nevertheless, significant differences were found with regard to the value attached to justice depending on the newspaper that the participants claimed to read. We can conclude that there is a mutual constitutive circular movement between the social representation of justice diffused by the newspapers and university students’ social representations. Moreover, the differences identified in the way justice was evaluated in the peripheral elements might express the existence of different positionings related to a hegemonic social representation.     

Dynamic Marketing Capabilities: Toward an Integrative Framework

In recent years, the dynamic capabilities view has attracted attention in the management literature, and theoretical papers note many research challenges. Currently, one of the most significant issues is the role of the marketing function in the development of dynamic capabilities, and some recent discussions have even introduced the new term ‘dynamic marketing capabilities’. The main area of interest is how to achieve a well‐integrated framework to serve as the starting point for empirical papers. Although the most recent research proposes a wide range of processes as possible dynamic marketing capabilities, it is difficult to find consensus among these proposals. To resolve this difficulty, this paper seeks to define the dynamic marketing capabilities construct based on accepted components in the generic dynamic capabilities view. More specifically, it defines the role of dynamic marketing capabilities through absorptive capacity and knowledge management. By identifying these components and relating them in an integrative model, the authors propose to explain how dynamic marketing capabilities work and precisely which marketing processes promote both components.     

Percentiles of sums of heavy-tailed random variables: beyond the single-loss approximation

A perturbative approach is used to derive approximations of arbitrary order to estimate high percentiles of sums of positive independent random variables that exhibit heavy tails. Closed-form expressions for the successive approximations are obtained both when the number of terms in the sum is deterministic and when it is random. The zeroth order approximation is the percentile of the maximum term in the sum. Higher orders in the perturbative series involve the right-truncated moments of the individual random variables that appear in the sum. These censored moments are always finite. As a result, and in contrast to previous approximations proposed in the literature, the perturbative series has the same form regardless of whether these random variables have a finite mean or not. For high percentiles, and specially for heavier tails, the quality of the estimate improves as more terms are included in the series, up to a certain order. Beyond that order the convergence of the series deteriorates. Nevertheless, the approximations obtained by truncating the perturbative series at intermediate orders are remarkably accurate for a variety of distributions in a wide range of parameters.