Our study attempts to determine whether, and if so why, the large auditing firms are able to earn a premium on their audit work in the UK. We start by confirming the apparent existence of a Big Firm premium during the period 1985-2002. We examine industry specialisation, non audit service fee...

This study addresses whether firms' share prices correctly reflect two accounting measures, dirty surplus and really dirty surplus. Dirty surplus is readily observable from the financial statements, but really dirty surplus, which arises from recognizing equity transactions such as employee...

The collapse of the securitization market during the 2007-2008 Financial Crisis resulted from investors' concern with the value of securitized assets and securities issued by special purpose entities (SPEs). Research has shown that prior to the Crisis, investors valued equity of...

The internal rate of return (IRR) is a widely used benchmark for assessing the reliability of the accounting rate of return (ROA) as a measure of economic profitability. We turn this reasoning process on its head by demonstrating that a suitable (weighted average) aggregation of ROAs better...

This paper summarizes changes that have taken place in banking, the attendant financial innovations, and the challenges these innovations pose for accounting standard setters and regulators. We focus on asset securitizations and the difficulties in accounting for such transactions, in particular...

When producing IFRS financial standards, one of the IASB's main goals was to create a set of standards which were more useful to investors as a predictive tool. We assess the success of the IASB in this goal by investigating the effects of the introduction of IFRS on the relative information...