Effective corporate reporting and disclosure are critical in financial markets to promote vigorous competition, optimal performance, and transparency. This book examines whether existing disclosure frameworks in eight countries with the world's most significant securities exchanges achieve these objectives, and then, drawing on extensive empirical findings, identifies the policies and practices that contribute most to improving the overall quality of listed company reporting and communication. Contending that public disclosure of listed company information is an essential precondition to the long-term efficient operation of financial markets, the book provides analysis of such issues and topics as the following: - arguments for and against mandatory disclosure regimes; - key principles of periodic and continuous disclosure regulation; - tensions between direct and indirect investment in financial markets; - assumptions concerning the need to maintain a privileged role for financial intermediaries; - intermediary, analyst, and research incentives; - protection of individual investors; - selective disclosure; - disclosure of bad news; - the role of accounting standards; - public access to company briefings; - long term performance reporting and analysis; and - company reporting developments. A significant portion of the book provides an overview of disclosure regulation and practice in the United States, Canada, Germany, the United Kingdom, Japan, Hong Kong, Australia, and Singapore. A highly informative survey looks at company reports, disclosures, and websites of large listed companies, including Microsoft, Citigroup, Teck Resources, Deutsche Bank, BP, Sony, PetroChina Company, BHP Billiton, and Singapore Telecommunications. The book discusses common disclosure issues that arise across jurisdictions, provides valuable insights on the efficacy of existing disclosure regulation and practice, and highlights the important principles, processes, and practices that underpin best practice company disclosure frameworks. It will be welcomed by company boards and executives and their counsel, as well as by policymakers and scholars in the areas of corporate, securities, banking and financial law, accounting, economics and finance.

A new edition of the #1 text in the human computer Interaction field! This book seeks to chart the technology-fueled changes taking place in the field of corporate governance and describes the impact these changes are having on boards and the enterprises they govern. It also describes what the future could look like once companies truly embrace the power of technology to change governance. Additionally, this book will provide a set of "suggested action steps" for companies and their boards focused on ways they can leverage technology tools to enhance governance immediately. Through a review of the latest governance research, interviews with key thought leaders, and case studies of enterprises that have embraced governance technology, readers will be armed with new insights and approaches they can take to enhance the work of their boards and senior leaders to reach new levels of performance. Explains how to use design and evaluation techniques for developing successful interactive technologies Demonstrates, through many examples, the cognitive, social and affective issues that underpin the design of these technologies Provides thought-provoking design dilemmas and interviews with expert designers and researchers Uses a strong pedagogical format to foster understanding and enjoyment An accompanying website contains extensive additional teaching and learning material including slides for each chapter, comments on chapter activities, and a number of in-depth case studies written by researchers and designers.

Corporate governance research has focused mainly on the analysis of the information that firms ought to disclose and the effects of disclosure, basically without considering the media involved. This paper examines the relevance of technology, and particularly the internet, for the improvement of corporate governance and transparency in listed companies. The need for this study is clear in view of the increasing interest shown by supervisory authorities for the oversight of the European and US capital markets in regulating not only content but also the manner in which corporate governance information is disclosed over the internet. In this paper we have quantified three corporate governance transparency indexes and empirically identified the variables that explain the levels of disclosure attained. Our results reveal that the firms scoring highest in terms of transparency are also those that are most likely to use the internet as a channel for the disclosure of corporate governance information. Key factors underlying the levels of transparency observed include the degree to which firms are followed by analyst, the time they have been listed, their visibility and the fact of belonging to the communications and information services sector.

Privacy is a growing concern in the United States and around the world. The spread of the Internet and the seemingly boundaryless options for collecting, saving, sharing, and comparing information trigger consumer worries. Online practices of business and government agencies may present new ways to compromise privacy, and e-commerce and technologies that make a wide range of personal information available to anyone with a Web browser only begin to hint at the possibilities for inappropriate or unwarranted intrusion into our personal lives. Engaging Privacy and Information Technology in a Digital Age presents a comprehensive and multidisciplinary examination of privacy in the information age. It explores such important concepts as how the threats to privacy evolving, how can privacy be protected and how society can balance the interests of individuals, businesses and government in ways that promote privacy reasonably and effectively? This book seeks to raise awareness of the web of connectedness among the actions one takes and the privacy policies that are enacted, and provides a variety of tools and concepts with which debates over privacy can be more fruitfully engaged. Engaging Privacy and Information Technology in a Digital Age focuses on three major components affecting notions, perceptions, and expectations of privacy: technological change, societal shifts, and circumstantial discontinuities. This book will be of special interest to anyone interested in understanding why privacy issues are often so intractable.

This book studies an overarching question of the challenges faced by Chinese lawmakers, Chinese listed companies, Chinese companies’ external advisers, and securities regulators in dealing with Chinese cross-border listed companies’ continuous disclosure in Australia, and how can these challenges be addressed. Chinese listed companies are struggling to meet the continuous disclosure requirements while listing in Australia and have even been depicted as having poor corporate governance and transparency. Many get delisted from the securities market in Australia subsequently due to non-compliance in continuous disclosure or are straight rejected from listing because of continuous disclosure compliance concerns. This book cuts in from this angle and delves deep into the overarching question through the following four sub-questions: What are the theories and policies behind the continuous disclosure regimes in Australia and China and how have they been differently implemented in the securities markets in these two countries? What are the deficiencies, at the intracompany level, contributing to Chinese cross-border listed companies’ non-compliant continuous disclosure in Australia? What are the limitations, from the perspective of external advisers’ efforts, contributing to Chinese cross-border listed companies’ non-compliant continuous disclosure in Australia? What are the difficulties, at the regulatory level, contributing to Chinese cross-border listed companies’ non-compliant continuous disclosure in Australia? In addressing these questions and putting forward corresponding reform proposals, this book takes not only legal but also historical, cultural, and political-economic factors into consideration.

Put aside the wild daily swings in the market for a moment and concentrate on this key fact: the ratio of market values to book values of S&P 500 companies has ascended from one-to-one in the late 1970s to six-to-one today. For some, this reflects excessive speculation, an unsustainable bubble. But a better explanation may be that during this period the source of value creation in our economy moved from tangible to intangible assets, from hardware to software-literally, from bricks and mortar to brains. A transition this significant requires big changes in the legal and regulatory framework in which the economy functions. Significant modernization has occurred in the frameworks applicable to financial services and telecommunications. Yet, suprisingly, as the information age has advanced and balance sheets have become less relevant as measure of true value, there has been relatively little change in the regulatory requirements for disclosure, including the contents of the financial statements that form the heart of our corporate disclosure system. The growing gap between balance sheet and market values tells us that we will need something different in the future, as more and more companies earn their profits from intangible assets. Failure to properly value intangibles can result in distorted valuation, volatility and, perhaps, a bubble. So what is to be done? First, the existing model for financial disclosure must be updated so that it does a better job of reflecting the value of the intangibles that are the core assets of the information economy. Investors will be best served if all assets -tangible and intangible-are measured and reported, even if the value of some intangibles can only be communicated through indicators. Such an indicator could consist of a company's product returns, for example. In addition, financial reporting must be forward-looking, describing not only historical cost, but providing as accurate a snapshot as possible of an organization's current operations and likely future prospects. In part, this can be done through business releasing non-financial data that can be analyzed against the data of competitors and industry benchmarks. To achieve these objectives, a number of prominent analysts and accounting theorists have suggested that companies supplement their current financial reports with databases, accessible through the internet, These would contain more finely grained components of the current asset, liability and expense categories than the information aggregated in conventional quarterly and annual reports. Other useful data elements would include indicators from which the status of such intangibles as customer loyalty and employee satisfaction might be derived. The number of times a customer makes purchases of a household item from a particular company is a clear example. Work is already under way in many industries to settle only the precise definitions of various data elements that would be used for electronic data interchange, This work uses a new data processing language known as extensible markup language (XML) that permits the tagging of the multiplicity of data elements that are part of the movement of goods in a supply chain. The tags allow software applications of various kinds to dip into this pool of data and extract the information necessary for carrying on business transactions in t a common language. When applied to financial information, it would permit more rapid and thorough analysis and benchmarking, Most important, it would permit assessments of company prospects to become user-driven, rather than issue-driven. But a framework is clearly necessary to achieve this. We need a reliable model encouraged by regulators but user and market-driven, and developed by analysts, corporate financial officers and the accounting profession. As new approaches to disclosure take hold-such as the recent and unconventional release of customer acquisition costs by Amazon.com-the role of accountants will change. Instead of certifying financial statements, accountants may work on defining data elements providing assurance for the reliability of company data disclosures. In addition, as US and international accounting standard converge, accountants may acquire responsibility for reporting on the reliability of indicators used to measure the intangible assets-such as those that increasingly represent the core value of may companies. The US economy continues to spawn innovative companies and new ideas. It would be ironic if the capital markets, which supply the necessary financing for innovation and change, were unable to benefit from the vast improvements in information use that the internet has made possible.

In light of the overwhelming impact of technology on modern life, this thought-provoking book critically analyses the interaction of innovation, technology and corporate law. It highlights the impact of artificial intelligence and distributed ledgers on corporate governance and form, examining the extent to which technology may enhance or displace conventional theories and practices concerning corporate governance and regulation. Expert contributors from multiple jurisdictions identify themes and challenges that transcend national boundaries and confront the international community as a whole.