This paper asks first why consumers seek financing through credit cards. It then evaluates the impact on consumer welfare of the constraints on increasing interest rates present in the Credit Card Act. We model consumer financing in a setting where consumers do not commit to borrow from a given...

In classical perfect and complete markets, prices form a Martingale and stock returns (or equivalently, successive price changes) are serially uncorrelated. However, there is considerable evidence in the finance literature showing that stock returns are serially correlated both in the short and...

Mark-to-market accounting, as required by FAS No. 157, has been implicated as a contributor to the financial meltdown caused by the housing crisis and the consequent write-down of securities backed by mortgages (MBS) and collateralized debt obligations (CDO). In this paper, we investigate the...

This paper presents a model of auditor-client relationship-building. Existing literature suggests that quasi-rents rising from long auditor tenure have a negative effect on auditor independence. In contrast to this conventional wisdom, our paper shows a positive effect of quasi-rents resulting...

The most prevalent forecasts of firms' long-term earnings issued by analysts are two-year-ahead earnings per share (EPS) estimates. When introduced by analysts, two-year-ahead EPS estimates set market expectations for firms' future earnings. Subsequent revisions to these estimates are highly...

The vast majority of reports written by sell-side equity analysts conclude with a reiteration of the analyst's existing recommendation on a firm's stock. Yet there is a disproportionate amount of research that focuses on the market reactions of changes in recommendations and a prevailing sense...

The paper investigates the effects of mark-to-market write-downs by financial institutions on market prices and volumes, as well as the prominent role that illiquidity plays in exacerbating the direct and spillover effects of exit valuation on equity and credit default swaps markets. Using a...

Valuation requires the prediction of future growth rate of persistent earnings, which depend on past and present internal, unobservable, investment decisions. In this study, we investigate the quot;managementquot; of the series of growth rates in a multi-period principal-agent model with a moral...

Numerous principal-agent situations of interest to accounting involve limited liability by the agent. We explore this issue when the outcome is mutually observable (MOC) and when it is not and the contract is based instead on the agent's report (NCC). We find that when outcome is not observable,...