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This research develops a model for assessing the quality of risk disclosures and applies the proposed model to four companies in the food production and processing sector. We contribute to the literature by extending prior work on risk disclosure quality using a longitudinal approach to assess the quality of risk reporting. While previous studies have described disclosure practices, this paper adopts a normative approach to disclosure. By suggesting a way of improving risk reporting disclosures, the paper provides guidance for current and future company managers. In line with previous research, this paper identifies certain problems with existing risk disclosures. Results suggest that company managers prefer providing disclosures that are symbolic rather than substantive. We argue that institutional factors and proprietary costs contribute towards and can explain this behaviour.In suggesting a way forward we highlight the role that stakeholders including managers, users, regulators and auditors can play in improving the quality of risk reporting. Flexibility in reporting could be maintained by adopting a properly monitored 'comply or explain' approach.

This paper provides a wide-ranging and up-to-date (1997-2016) review of the archival empirical risk-reporting literature. The reviewed papers are classified into two principal themes: the incentives for and/or informativeness of risk reporting. Our review demonstrates areas of significant divergence in the literature specifically: mandatory versus voluntary risk reporting, manual versus automated content analysis, within-country versus crosscountry variations in risk reporting, and risk reporting in financial versus non-financial firms. Our paper identifies a number of issues which require further research. In particular we draw attention to two: first, a lack of clarity and consistency around the conceptualization of risk; and second, the potential costs and benefits of standard-setters' involvement.

Abstract-Active microwave imaging is explored as an imaging modality for early detection of breast cancer. When exposed to microwaves, breast tumor exhibits electrical properties that are significantly different from that of healthy breast tissues. The two approaches of active microwave imaging -confocal microwave technique with measured reflected signals and microwave tomographic imaging with measured scattered signals are addressed here. Normal and malignant breast tissue samples of same person are subjected to study within 30 minutes of mastectomy. Corn syrup is used as coupling medium, as its dielectric parameters show good match with that of the normal breast tissue samples. As bandwidth of the transmitter is an important aspect in the time domain confocal microwave imaging approach, wideband bowtie antenna having 2:1 VSWR bandwidth of 46% is designed for the transmission and reception of microwave signals. Same antenna is used for microwave tomographic imaging too at the frequency of 3000 MHz. Experimentally obtained time domain results are substantiated by finite difference time domain (FDTD) analysis. 2-D tomographic images are reconstructed with the collected scattered data using distorted Born iterative method. Variations of dielectric permittivity in breast samples are distinguishable from the obtained permittivity profiles.

This study examines the association between earnings quality and the cost of equity in the United Kingdom (UK) over the time period 2005-2011. This setting and time period enables us to examine the effect of IFRS based earnings on the pricing of earnings quality and how this relation is influenced by a period of severe macroeconomic turbulence as in the case of the recent global financial crisis. We find a significant negative association between each accounting-based earnings quality proxy considered separately and the cost of equity. Our results also indicate that during the financial crisis the relationship between earnings quality and cost of equity becomes more prominent than in the pre-crisis period. This strengthening of the relationship during a period of macroeconomic turbulence shows the importance investors place on earnings quality as a measure of risk. Our results also document that investors place more importance on the innate component of accruals quality than on the discretionary component. These results should be reassuring to US standard setters who are considering adopting or converging to IFRS.