New international standards for environmental auditing are now being actively promoted by public authorities and adopted by private firms. One important feature of these standards is their emphasis on managerial systems and incentives that support a wiser use of environmental resources. This...

We analyze the survival and success of a large sample of Canadian penny stock initial public offerings (IPOs), launched mostly by small and unprofitable firms from 1986 to 2003. The failure rate of these IPOs is lower than the one observed in the U.S. for larger IPOs, probably because of lax...

The0501n objective of the new Bankruptcy Act (Bill C-22) is to promote the use of financial reorganization in order to increase the chances of survival of businesses that are experiencing financial difficulties and, as a consequence, to save jobs. Data from a sample of 417 commercial...

What is a rational decision-maker supposed to do when facing an unfamiliar problem, where there is uncertainty but no basis for making probabilistic assessments? One answer is to use a form of expected utility theory, and assume that agents assign their own subjective probabilities to each...

The objective of this paper is to look into the probability that, given the choice, corporate groups would opt for taxation on a consolidated basis. Consolidation would allow them to offset losses crossborder but remove the opportunity to exploit international tax-rate differentials between...

Using a large sample of European firms that mandatorily adopted IFRS, this paper assesses how firm-level governance, as proxied by board attributes, and country-level enforcement interplay in affecting financial reporting quality. Financial reporting quality is assumed to have three dimensions:...

We provide results for the valuation of European style contingent claims for a large class of specifications of the underlying asset returns. Our valuation results obtain in a discrete time, infinite state-space setup using the no-arbitrage principle and an equivalent martingale measure. Our...

Equity risk measured by beta is of great interest to both academics and practitioners. Existing estimates of beta use historical returns. Many studies have found option-implied volatility to be a strong predictor of future realized volatility. We .nd that option-implied volatility and skewness...

Standard empirical investigations of jump dynamics in returns and volatility are fairly complicated due to the presence of latent continuous-time factors. We present a new discrete-time framework that combines heteroskedastic processes with rich specifications of jumps in returns and volatility....

Many continuous time term structure of interest rate models assume a factor structure where the drift and volatility functions are affine functions of the state variable process. These models involve very specific parametric choices of factors and functional specifications of the drift and...