The aim of this study is to investigate whether and how Serbian companies manage earnings to avoid losses and to avoid earnings decreases. The empirical evidence found in this study shows that there is a discontinuity in the distribution of reported earnings around the zero earnings benchmark suggesting that Serbian companies engage in earnings management to avoid reporting losses. Furthermore, this continuity disappears when we subtracted discretionary accruals from reported earnings indicating that Serbian companies use discretionary accruals as a tool for earnings management. However, the distribution of earnings does not provide evidence that Serbian companies manage earnings to avoid earnings decreases. These results are robust to alternative methods of scaling earnings and various ways of estimating discretionary accruals.

Over the recent years, there has been a significant increase in the number of women belonging to the Internet population. With this increase, researchers have begun to investigate the role of gender in information technology (IT) adoption and its related innovations, including e-commerce. Despite the large body of research on the topic, we know of no work that specifically reviews the literature regarding gender differences in these domains. To address this gap, we systematically reviewed the recent literature (in the period 2000–2017) regarding gender differences in IT adoption and six related behaviors and responses: online shopping adoption, online trust, attitude and satisfaction with e-commerce, website design preferences, and information processing strategies. Findings from the current review indicated that, in general, men are more likely to try a new IT and shop online than women

Purpose

The paper aims to re-interpret the role of corporate social responsibility (CSR) in limiting the extreme practices in earnings management (EM) by using evidence from large UK companies.

Design/methodology/approach

The study has used content analysis and disclosure index to measure the level of CSR. The authors measured EM based on discretionary accruals by using cross-sectional version of the modified Jones model.

Findings

The findings of this study reveal that companies with a higher commitment to CSR activities are less likely to manage earnings through accruals.

Originality/value

This study shed more light on the potential impact of CSR on earnings management in the context of the UK. Prior research on the impact of CSR on earnings management has used exclusively CSR scores, provided by CSR score indices. The manual measurement used in this study for CSR (disclosure index/content analysis) is considered to provide a more detailed and precise measure.

With advances in technology, the internet has allowed advertisers to design advertisements with unique features that can help capture consumers’ visual attention and enhance their psychological states such as attitudes and emotions. Yet, web advertising features and attributes can significantly contribute to online consumer behaviors. This paper strives to provide guidelines for researchers and advertisers as to what outlines the effects of online advertising design on consumers’ processing and multiple outcomes. The findings indicated that exposure to a well-designed online advertisement can influence several cognitive and emotional responses, such as attention to the ad, motivations to process the ad, depth of processing, pleasure, arousal, and online purchase intention. According to the present review, consumer involvement is regarded as an important moderator in the relationships between web advertising content as well as design and several responses, including consumers’ intention to search and process information. The article concludes by identifying several areas of opportunities for advancing our understanding of web advertising effects. Marketers and advertisers will find the current work useful, as it can be used to maximize the effectiveness of web advertising.

With web advertising growing to be a huge industry, it is important to understand the effectiveness of web advertisement. In this study we investigate the effects of web advertising visual design (WAVD) purchasing intention within the framework of an integrated model. Nine hypotheses were developed and tested on a dataset of 316 observations collected via a questionnaire survey. The results of structural equation modeling (SEM) indicate that while web advertising visual cues influence consumers' purchasing intention through advertising attitudes and brand attitudes, they do not have direct effects on purchasing intention. Further results on the moderating role of gender suggest that web advertising visual cues have direct effect on consumers' purchasing intention for male groups but not for female groups. This study contributes to the understanding the role of visual dimensions in forming online purchase intentions.