Pakistan, Turkey, auditors, ethics, personal values,

Purpose -This paper focuses on the corporate life cycle concept which is one of the vital theories to analyze the firms more homogeneously. The aim of this study is to elaborate main life cycle classification procedures and to compare the most cited methodologies regarding financial indicators according to the expectations from the stages. Methodology -We review the literature and especially examine three firm life cycle methods; Anthony and Ramesh (1992), Yonpae and Chen (2006) and Dickinson (2011). We also develop five hypotheses that are related to firm size, profitability, stock returns, liquidity and risk of the firms for three different stages through using descriptive statistics and t test. Findings -According to the results, while growth firms have higher risk, mature firms are more profitable and get higher stock returns. On the other hand, decline firms are bigger and more liquid than the other stages. The findings also suggest that Anthony and Ramesh (1992) life cycle classification procedure provides a little better insight than the other methods. Conclusion -The study defines the firm life cycle notion which is an expanded version of product life cycle through explaining the most common classification procedures. Investors should concentrate on firms that are at growth stage since they have more potential to receive profitable projects. However, mature firms are at the peak point of the profitability and the risk is relatively low. Firms at the decline stage are one of the biggest candidates of stagnation and the capacity cannot be fully utilized.

Based on the ongoing claims that comprehensive income measures financial performance better than net income, thus enhance the transparency and usefulness of financial statements, International Accounting Standard No.1 (IAS 1) allows reporting comprehensive income in a primary and separate financial statement. From this point forth, we compare the usefulness of comprehensive income with net income in terms of financial performance proxied by stock price, stock returns and operating cash flows. Using a sample of listed companies in Turkey, we find some evidence that comprehensive income is a better measurement than net income, especially explaining stock price and market returns. However, the association between comprehensive income and stock price is negative. In that sense, our findings are consistent with previous researches arguing that investors find the financial information in comprehensive income is more volatile, risky, transitory and incomplete than net income, resulting in decreased stock price.

Stock repurchase, as a corporate finance tool and a substitute for cash dividends, plays an important role in distributing excess cash. Following a prohibited period due to its potentially negative outcomes for shareholders and creditors, stock repurchase has recently been regulated within the company law systems of many countries pursuant to its increasing popularity in satisfying special financing requirements of companies. That the regulatory improvements have removed the uncertainty inherent in such transactions has increased the volume of, especially, the open market stock repurchases. Turkish legislation, i.e. Commercial Code and Capital Markets Law, has latterly been updated in accordance with EU acquis communautaire in order to allow stock repurchase for listed firms. We analyse movements in stock prices after stock repurchase transactions in order to make inferences about why stock repurchase is used and what its impacts/signals are in Turkish market at their infancy stage. Having followed a standard event study methodology, the results reveal that investor reaction to stock repurchase transactions is generally positive in the short-term. These results support the notion of a signaling hypothesis as a motivator behind stock repurchase decisions.

The problem of finding the optimal timing of audit activities within an organisation has been addressed by many researchers. We propose a stochastic programming formulation with Mixed Integer Linear Programming (MILP) and Constraint Programming (CP) certainty-equivalent models. In experiments neither approach dominates the other. However, the CP approach is orders of magnitude faster for large audit times, and almost as fast as the MILP approach for small audit times. J Comb Optim (2010) 19: 325-346 This work generalises a previous approach by relaxing the assumption of instantaneous audits, and by prohibiting concurrent auditing.