We develop and validate new text-based measures of firms’ financial and non-financial value drivers. Using the Wayback Machine to access public US firms’ archived websites from 1995-2020, we scrape text from corporate homepages. We use Kaplan and Norton’s (1992) balanced scorecard, as well as Ittner and Larcker’s (2001) value-based management framework, to classify this text. We then construct at the yearly level standardized measures of firms’ financial and non-financial value drivers. We show that our measures vary over time in accordance with broad trends in the economy and changes in management practices. We show that our value driver measures vary both within and across industries, and we capture related yet distinct constructs that shed light on firm strategy. Finally, we validate our measures by documenting associations between firms’ value drivers and established accounting, financial, and non-financial measures. Our paper provides researchers with a means to construct value-driver measures for any firm that possesses or has possessed a website.

Contests that non-contestants consume for entertainment are a fixture of economic, cultural and political life. We exploit injury-induced changes to teams' line-ups in a professional sports setting to examine whether individuals prefer to consume contests that have more uncertain outcomes. Studying data from the Australian Football League, we use an instrumental variables design to show that a one standard deviation increase in game outcome uncertainty causes, on average, an 11.2 per cent increase in attendance. When presented alongside ordinary least square's estimates, our results suggest that previous studies may heavily underestimate spectators' preferences for evenly balanced contests.

We introduce country-level Google search activity as a direct measure of the level of stakeholder attention directed towards sustainability reports. We validate this measure by establishing that search activity for sustainability reports is correlated with temporal patterns in firms' supply of these reports. To frame the economic magnitude of this search behaviour, we then show that the level of attention directed towards sustainability reports is very low compared to the level of attention directed towards financial and accounting information. Next, we examine two related research questions. First, we identify who pays attention to sustainability reports. We find, consistent with the environmental Kuznets curve, that attention towards sustainability reports is strongly associated with economic development. Consistent with findings in prior research that suggest citizens in stakeholder-oriented countries have stronger preferences for firms to act prosocially, we also find that search activity for sustainability reports relative to search activity for financial performance metrics is greater in civil law countries than in common law countries. Finally, we then explore the question of why individuals pay attention to sustainability reports and find evidence that suggests sustainability reports are used for two primary purposes: evaluating the societal impacts of firms' actions; and, firm valuation.

We use game-level data from the Australian Football League (AFL) to examine superstar workers' productivity and pay. By exploiting teams' injury-induced line-up changes between games, we show that, compared with replacement-level players, superstars increase their teams' likelihood of winning away games by approximately 15 percentage points. While we then show that betting markets appear to appropriately price superstars' marginal productivity, we present back-of-the-envelope calculations that suggest that teams underpay superstar players by at least 30 per cent. We discuss how inaccurate performance evaluations, labour market regulations, long-term back-loaded contracts, clubs' attempts to reduce harmful intra-team pay disparities and on-field success as a form of payment-in-kind may explain our findings.

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We use a field experiment in professional sports to compare effects of providing absolute, relative, or both absolute and relative measures in performance reports for employees. Although studies have documented that the provision of these types of measures can benefit performance, theory from economic and accounting literature suggests that it may be optimal for firms to direct employees' attention to some types of measures by omitting others. In line with this theory, we find that relative performance information alone yields the best performance effects in our setting-that is, that a subset of information (relative performance information) dominates the full information set (absolute and relative performance information together) in boosting performance. In cross-sectional and survey-data analyses, we do not find that restricting the number of measures shown per se benefits performance. Rather, we find that restricting the type of measures shown to convey only relative information increases involvement in peer-performance comparison, benefitting performance. Our findings extend research on weighting of and responses to measures in performance reports.

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The application of advanced digitization technologies to accounting and business archives has created new opportunities for accounting and business historians. The joint American Accounting Association and European Accounting Association Task Force (2006–2010) that examined digitization confirmed this. This paper explores these opportunities, along with some attendant challenges and cautions, with reference to the digitization of two significant archives located in Australia. The first is the archive of CPA Australia, a professional accounting association that has its beginnings in 1886 and which today has over 132,000 members. The second is the archive accumulated by the pre-eminent accounting scholar Raymond Chambers during his long and extraordinarily productive tenure at the University of Sydney. Studies of surviving business records, biography and institutional history provide examples of scholarship that is enabled by digitization technology and which has the capacity to inform contemporary issues and debates.