Impact of financial crisis on earnings management in listed companies of Portugal and UK

Firm’s financial information is essential to stakeholders’ decision making. Although not always financial statements show the firm’s real image. This study examines listed firms from Portugal and UK. Firms have different purposes to manipulate earnings: some strive for influencing investors’ perception about a particular company, some try to provide better position for gaining finance from credit institutions or paying less tax to tax authorities. Usually, this behaviour is induced when firms have financial problems. Consequently, the study also aims to see the impact of financial crisis on earnings management. We try to answer question how does extent of firms’ involvement in earnings management change when the world undergoes financial crisis. Furthermore, we also compare two countries with different legal forces in terms of quality of accounting to see the main differences. We used a panel data methodology to analyse financial data from 2004 till 2014 of listed firms from Portugal and UK. Beneish (1999) model was applied to categorize manipulator and non-manipulator firms. Analysing accounting information according to Beneish’s ratios, findings suggest that financial crisis had certain impact on firms’ tendency to manipulate financial results in UK although it is not statistically significant. Moreover, besides the differences between Portugal and UK, results contradict the common view of legal systems’ quality, as UK firms tend to apply more accounting techniques for manipulation than the Portuguese ones. Our main results also confirm that some UK firms manipulate ratios of receivables’ days, asset quality index, depreciation index, leverage, sales and general administrative expenses whereas Portuguese firms manipulate only receivables’ days. Finally, we also find that the main reason to manipulate results is not to influence the cost of obtained funds neither to minimize tax burden since net profit does not explain the ratios used in the Beneish model. Results suggest that the main concern to listed firms manipulate results is to influence financial investors perception.

"I’m complicit and I’m ambivalent and that’s crazy":care-less spaces for women in the academy

This paper is about three working class women academics in their 40s, who are at different phases in their career. I take a reflexive, feminist, (Reay 2000, 2004, Ribbens and Edwards 1998) life story approach (Plummer, 2001) in order to understand their particular narratives about identity, complicity, relationships and discomfort within the academy, and then how they inhabit care-less spaces. However unique their narratives, I am able to explore an aspect of higher education – women and their working relationships – through a lens of care-less spaces, and argue that care-less-ness in the academy, can create and reproduce animosity and collusion. Notably, this is damaging for intellectual pursuits, knowledge production and markedly, the identity of woman academics. In introducing this work, I first contextualise women in the academy and define the term care-less spaces, then move onto discuss feminist methods. I then explore and critique in some detail, the substantive findings under the headings of ‘complicity and ‘faking’ it’ and ‘publishing and collaboration’. The final section concludes the paper by drawing on Herring’s (2013) legal premise, in the context of care ethics, as a way to interrogate particular care-less spaces within higher education.

Connectionist-based rules describing the pass-through of individual goods prices into trend inflation in the United States

This paper demonstrates a mechanism whereby rules can be extracted from a feedforward neural network trained to characterize the inflation "pass-through" problem in American monetary policy, defined as the relationship between changes in the growth rate(s) of individual commodities and the economy-wide rate of growth of consumer prices. Monthly price data are encoded and used to train a group of candidate connectionist architectures. One candidate is selected for rule extraction, using a custom decompositional extraction algorithm that generates rules in human-readable and machine-executable form. Rule and network accuracy are compared, and comments are made on the relationships expressed within the discovered rules. The types of discovered relationships could be used to guide monetary policy decisions.

Representation and participation in child care proceedings: what about the voice of the parents?

In Ireland, the Constitution guarantees very strong rights to parents and the family, and there has been a long and unfortunate history of failures to adequately protect children at risk. As a result, there has been much discussion in recent years about the need to improve legal mechanisms designed to protect the rights of children. By comparison, little attention has been given to establishing whether the theoretically strong rights of parents translate into strongly protected rights in practice. This paper presents new empirical evidence on the manner in which child care proceedings in Ireland balance the rights and interests of children and parents, including the rates at which orders are granted, the frequency of and conditions in which legal representation is provided, and the extent to which parents are able to actively participate in proceedings. A number of systemic issues are identified that restrict the capacity of the system to emphasise parental rights and hear the voice of parents to the extent that would be expected when looking at the legal provisions in isolation.

Les droits réels et personnels sur les titres détenus auprès d'un intermédiaire : analyse comparative en droit québécois interne et international privé

Les transactions sur les valeurs mobilières ainsi que leur mise en garantie se font bien au-delà des frontières nationales. Elles impliquent une multitude d’intervenants, tels que l’émetteur, un grand nombre d’intermédiaires disposés en structure pyramidale, un ou des investisseurs et, bien évidemment, les bénéficiaires desdites valeurs mobilières ou garanties. On peut aussi signaler l’existence de nombreux portefeuilles diversifiés contenant des titres émis par plusieurs émetteurs situés dans plusieurs états. Toute la difficulté d’une telle diversité d’acteurs, de composantes financières et juridiques, réside dans l’application de règles divergentes et souvent conflictuelles provenant de systèmes juridiques d’origines diverses (Common Law et civiliste). De nombreux juristes, de toutes nationalités confondues, ont pu constater ces dernières années que les règles de création, d’opposabilité et de réalisation des sûretés, ainsi que les règles de conflit de lois qui aident à déterminer la loi applicable à ces différentes questions, ne répondaient plus adéquatement aux exigences juridiques nationales dans un marché financier global, exponentiel et sans réelles frontières administratives. Afin de résoudre cette situation et accommoder le marché financier, de nombreux textes de loi ont été révisés et adaptés. Notre analyse du droit québécois est effectuée en fonction du droit américain et canadien, principales sources du législateur québécois, mais aussi du droit suisse qui est le plus proche de la tradition civiliste québécoise, le tout à la lueur de la 36e Convention de La Haye du 5 juillet 2006 sur la loi applicable à certains droits sur des titres détenus auprès d'un intermédiaire. Par exemple, les articles 8 et 9 du Uniform Commercial Code (UCC) américain ont proposé des solutions modernes et révolutionnaires qui s’éloignent considérablement des règles traditionnelles connues en matière de bien, de propriété, de sûreté et de conflits de lois. Plusieurs autres projets et instruments juridiques dédiés à ces sujets ont été adoptés, tels que : la Loi uniforme sur le transfert des valeurs mobilières (LUTVM) canadienne, qui a été intégrée au Québec par le biais de la Loi sur le transfert de valeurs mobilières et l’obtention de titres intermédiés, RLRQ, c.T-11.002 (LTVMQ) ; la 36e Convention de La Haye du 5 juillet 2006 sur la loi applicable à certains droits sur des titres détenus auprès d'un intermédiaire; la Loi fédérale sur le droit international privé (LDIP) suisse, ainsi que la Loi fédérale sur les titres intermédiés (LTI) suisse. L’analyse de ces textes de loi nous a permis de proposer une nouvelle version des règles de conflit de lois en matière de sûretés et de transfert des titres intermédiés en droit québécois. Cette étude devrait susciter une réflexion profonde du point de vue d’un juriste civiliste, sur l’efficacité des nouvelles règles québécoises de sûretés et de conflit de lois en matière de titres intermédiés, totalement inspirées des règles américaines de Common Law. Un choix qui semble totalement ignorer un pan du système juridique civiliste et sociétal.

The institutional design of intra-party democracy through legal instruments: Turkish case

The importance of political parties for contemporary representative democracies is beyond dispute. Despite their significance for state-level democracy, political parties continue to be regarded as oligarchical and to be criticised because of their internal practices. For this reason, intra-party democracy (IPD) warrants in-depth analysis. This thesis investigates IPD in Turkey, primarily from the perspective of participatory democracy, with the purpose of suggesting reforms to the Turkish Political Parties Law (TPPL). Turkish political parties and Turkish party regulation provide an interesting case because there is a significant difference between mature democracies and Turkey regarding IPD regulation. IPD in established democracies has always been regarded as a private concern of parties and has been left unregulated. IPD in Turkey, by contrast, is provided for both by the constitution and the TPPL. Although IPD is a constitutional and legal requirement in Turkey, however, political parties in fact display a high level of non-democratic administration. The main reason is that the TPPL only pays lip service to the idea of IPD and requires no specific measures apart from establishing a party congress with a representative form of democracy. By establishing and holding party congresses, political parties are perceived as conforming to the requirements of IPD under the law. In addition, the contested nature of democracy as a concept has impeded the creation of efficacious legal principles. Thus, the existing party law fails to tackle the lack of IPD within political parties and, for this reason, is in need of reform. Furthermore, almost every Turkish party’s own constitution highlights the importance of IPD and promises IPD. However, these declared commitments to IPD in their constitutions alone, especially in countries where the democratic culture is weak, are unlikely to make much difference in practice. Accordingly, external regulation is necessary to ensure the protection of the rights and interests of the party members with regards to their participation in intra-party decision-making processes. Nevertheless, in spite of a general consensus in favour of reforming the TPPL, a lack of consensus exists as to what kind of reforms should be adopted. This thesis proposes that reforming the TPPL in line with an approach based on participatory democracy could provide better IPD within Turkish political parties, citing as evidence comparative case studies of the participatory practices for policy-making, leadership selection and candidate selection in mature democracies. This thesis also analyses membership registration and the effect of state funding on IPD, which are highly problematic in Turkey and represent impediments to the flourishing of IPD.

Organizaciones regionales y diversidad cultural: la diplomacia de la Unión Europea con el Mercosur entre la sombra de Hollywood y la acción intergubernamental

El objetivo de este artículo es doble: por un lado explorar la habilidad de la Unión Europea para llevar a cabo una política audiovisual dirigida al Mercosur y promover las normas de la Convención sobre la diversidad de las expresiones culturales; por otro, analizar el impacto del modelo de política audiovisual de la UE en el desarrollo de la cooperación audiovisual con el Mercosur y centrarse en los principales vectores que configuran el paisaje audiovisual del Mercosur. El texto pretende destacar cómo y por qué la UE persigue una política audiovisual con esa región, cuáles son los propósitos y los límites de actuación. En este sentido, se preocupa por entender cómo la diplomacia audiovisual de la UE interactúa con otros actores, como las acciones gubernamentales llevadas a cabo desde la propia UE y el Mercosur, así como las prácticas del sector privado (Hollywwod y los grandes conglomerados de medios).

Einige Erwägungen zur juristischen Untersuchung in Mexiko

Die neuen Paradigmen der Rechtswissenschaft nötigen uns beim Erwerb juristischen Wissens dazu, uns in eine kreativere und problemorientiertere Dynamik des Lehrens-Lernens einzugliedern. Die neuen Generationen der Rechtsgelehrten sollten darum bemüht sein, die verschiedenen theoretisch-methodologischen Strömungen des Rechts, z.B. des juristischen Realismus, den juristischen Strukturalismus sowie die angewandte juristische Soziologie zu studieren und zu analysieren. Andererseits sollten sie nicht dogmatisch und ausschliesslich den juristischen Positivismus des 19. Jahrhunderts vertreten. Die juristischen Fakultäten und Schulen der Republik Mexiko zeichnen sich dadurch aus, dass sie die traditionelle juristische Lehre bewahren. Darin liegt der Grund, dass es nur wenige Juristen gibt, die sich der juristischen Forschung und der wissenschaftlichen Praxis widmen.

Migrant domestic workers, vulnerability and the law: immigration and employment laws in Cyprus and Spain

The intersection of gender, welfare and immigration regimes has been one of the main focus of a rich scholarship on paid domestic work in Europe. This article brings into the discussion the nexus of employment and immigration law regimes to reflect on the role of legal regulation in structuring and reducing the vulnerability of domestic workers. I analyse this nexus by looking at the cases of Cyprus and Spain, two states falling under the cluster of Southern Mediterranean welfare regimes, that share certain characteristics in terms of immigration regimes, but have substantially different employment law regulation models. The first part sketches the debate on the employment law regulation of domestic work. The second part starts by giving an overview of the immigration regimes of Cyprus and Spain in relation to migrant domestic workers and then proceeds to analyse the two countries’ models and substance of employment law regulation in domestic work. The comparison of these two divergent approaches informs the debate on how the legal regulation of domestic work should be best structured. In Spain there have been recent dynamic legislative changes in the employment law regulation of domestic work. The final part of the article traces these changes and reflects on why such processes have not taken place in Cyprus.

Contemporary Transformations of the Relations between Politics, Culture and Religion in Western Europe. Some Notes on the Spanish Case

According to Tilly, two laws shaped the process of transformation undergone by Western European societies since the Peace of Westphalia until the end of the 20th century: their increasing inner homogenisation and their growing heterogeneity between them. Cultural inner homogenisation affected, fi rst, those ethnic groups living within the territories of the said states. The second phase of homogenisation impinged on those groups that immigrated after World War II. This process followed different models according to the country considered, but the 1973 oil crisis revealed their general lack of success. During the last quarter of the 20th century and onwards, these European societies have been altered by two progressive and contradictory global logics: a process of cultural homogenisation at the world level (rather than society level) and a process of cultural re-creation led by those groups with an immigrant background, who have reacted against their integration shortcomings by searching for new sources of social and personal esteem in their respective cultural and religious traditions. This paper seeks to clarify these processes from a social differentiation and political representation theory perspective. The latter becomes indispensable, as the said processes have happened in a context in which the structure of relations (i.e. communication) between civil society and the democratic political sphere have experienced a radical crisis. In this way, the complex relations that exist between civil society, culture, religion and politics in these Western European societies are depicted.

Sweat Lodges in Iron Age Iberian Peninsula: New Data, Typologies and Interpretations

Three questions on the study of NO Iberian Peninsula sweat lodges are posed. First, the new sauna of Monte Ornedo (Cantabria), the review of the one of Armea (Ourense), and the Cantabrian pedra formosa type are discussed. Second, the known types of sweat lodges are reconsidered underlining the differences between the Cantabrian and the Douro - Minho groups as these differences contribute to a better assessment of the saunas located out of those territories, such as those of Monte Ornedo or Ulaca. Third, a richer record demands a more specific terminology, a larger use of archaeometric analysis and the application of landscape archaeology or art history methodologies. In this way the range of interpretation of the sweat lodges is opened, as an example an essay is proposed that digs on some already known proposals and suggests that the saunas are material metaphors of wombs whose rationale derives from ideologies and ritual practices of Indo-European tradition.

Civic Humanism and the Classical Tradition in the Early Republic of Chile

The first decades of the 19th century constituted a period of profound change for Chile, the principal results of which were to be seen in the consolidation of the process of independence from Spanish dominion in 1818. The consequences were not limited to a revolution of military and political nature; they also included a renovation of the cultural panorama -at least among the educated patriots who made an effort to distance themselves ideologically from the Monarchy-, with the implicit challenge of establishing a new order for Chile, based on legitimate and universally recognizable foundations. The inspirational framework for these efforts is usually associated with other revolutionary examples -France and the United States- that preceded the emancipation processes in Spanish America, as well as with the discourses of illustrated liberalism. As we will attempt to demonstrate in this study, a new reading of the texts written by the Creoles that lead the Chilean independence process may, nonetheless, also reveal the relevance of the classical tradition as a model for the configuration and legitimization of the first Republican projects that especially admired the ideals of Republicanism.

Interpretation and typology Spanish indefinite pronoun uno in three discoursive genres

This study investigates the Spanish indefinite pronoun uno (“one”). After a detailed analysis of its occurrences in authentic language, we find that its interpretation varies depending on the linguistic context. Therefore, we examine which elements of the context - we focus on the broader context, beyond the sentence – have an impact on its interpretation and develop a typology of the indefinite pronoun as to its interpretation. The pronoun may be interpreted as completely generic or specific (referring to the speaker, the listener or a third person). Its interpretation can also be located in an intermediate position between these interpretive extremes.In addition, we compare its use in various discursive genres - spontaneous conversations, academic essays and web forum - which are distinguished by the presence or absence of interactivity and of more or less subjectivity / intersubjectivity. The comparison shows that pronoun use depends on these characteristics.

Digging up the frequency of phrasal verbs in English for the Police: the case of "up"

The present study focuses on the frequency of phrasal verbs with the particle up in the context of crime and police investigative work. This research emerges from the need to enlarge McCarthy and O’Dell’s (2004) scope from purely criminal behavior to police investigative actions. To do so, we relied on a corpus of 504,124 running words made up of spoken dialogues extracted from the script of the American TV series Castle shown on ABC since 2009. Based on Rudzka-Ostyn’s (2003) cognitive motivations for the particle up, we have identified five different meaning extensions for our phrasal verbs. Drawing from these findings, we have designed pedagogical activities for those L2 learners that study English at the Police Academy.

Sherman Alexie’s "The Toughest Indian in the World": Amalgamating the Oral and the Written Traditions

This article argues that The Toughest Indian in the World (2000) by Native-American author Sherman Alexie combines elements of his tribal (oral) tradition with others coming from the Western (literary) short-story form. Like other Native writers — such as Momaday, Silko or Vizenor — , Alexie is seen to bring into his short fiction characteristics of his people’s oral storytelling that make it much more dialogical and participatory. Among the author’s narrative techniques reminiscent of the oral tradition, aggregative repetitions of patterned thoughts and strategically-placed indeterminacies play a major role in encouraging his readers to engage in intellectual and emotional exchanges with the stories. Assisted by the ideas of theorists such as Ong (1988), Evers and Toelken (2001), and Teuton (2008), this article shows how Alexie’s short fiction is enriched and revitalized by the incorporation of oral elements. The essay also claims that new methods of analysis and assessment may be needed for this type of bicultural artistic forms. Despite the differences between the two modes of communication, Alexie succeeds in blending features and techniques from both traditions, thus creating a new hybrid short-story form that suitably conveys the trying experiences faced by his characters.