The release of AASB 1028 Accounting for Employee Entitlements followed a period of intense lobbying and debate, resulting in a standard that contained significantly less stringent requirements than those proposed in the preceding exposure draft. This paper examines the incentives for public...

The relative importance of country- and industry-specified factors vis-à-vis company-specific financial-statement-based information in explaining equity valuation multiples in an international setting is examined. Both country-specific effects via previously identified variables and an...

This paper examines accounting and non-accounting based restrictive covenants in Australian private debt agreements. With respect to the former, our findings differ from previous research on public debt. We find more varied definitions of constraints and their specific tightness in private debt...

Several major stock exchanges, including the NASDAQ and NYSE Euronext, have recently embarked on schemes to sponsor and promote analyst coverage for firms listed on their exchanges. We evaluate the efficacy of one such scheme pioneered by the Singapore Exchange (SGX). We find that sponsored...

Previous research shows that analysts' forecasts of earnings do not fully incorporate information contained in reported earnings variability. This study investigates whether the inefficient forecasting is due to a failure to incorporate observable information on two components of earnings...

Prior research (Behn et al. 2008) suggests that higher audit quality is associated with increased accuracy and reduced dispersion in earnings forecasts issued by sell-side analysts. We extend this work to consider how audit quality impacts the information environment in which analysts operate....

Regulation Fair Disclosure (FD), imposed by the Securities and Exchange Commission in October 2000, was designed to prohibit disclosure of material private information to selected market participants. The informational advantage such select participants gain is unclear. If multiple...

We investigate the ability of disclosed operating cash flow and indirect accruals components to explain annual returns for a sample of Australian firms. Consistent with claims made by accounting standard setters, we find evidence of significant explanatory power for disclosed operating cash flow...

This article reports the results of a study of the underpricing of initial public offerings under the Corporations Law. The authors commence by outlining a number of theories that have been advanced to explain the persistent underpricing of the issuing company's shares. The authors then examine...

[...]We also concentrate our survey on literature that testseconomic hypotheses within samples of U.S. firms. However,we believe that much of our discussion can be generalized tofirms throughout the world. Bushman and Smith (2003)present a broad overview of how differences in...