This study empirically analyzes over 3300 judgments on the long term and short term usefulness of individual firm pension accounting estimates over ten consecutive years (2001-2010). We find that the point estimates allowed by GAAP create challenges for auditors and do not appear to be useful...

This study empirically analyzes the long term and short term accuracy of over 3000 individual firm pension accounting estimates of rates of return on pension assets over ten consecutive years (2001-2010). We find that the point estimates allowed by GAAP create verifiability challenges for...

This study tests whether IFRS adoption increased accounting transparency based on model-driven hypotheses. Duffie and Lando (2001) show that changes to accounting transparency affect the spread/maturity relation of CDS instruments in very specific ways. Consistent with their model, we find that...

We examine the impact of the cultural norm of uncertainty avoidance on employee stock option (ESO) exercise behaviour using proprietary data from a multinational firm. We find that employees from countries with higher levels of uncertainty avoidance exercise their stock options earlier. These...

We investigate how high-profile accounting frauds affect peer firms' investment. We document that peers react to the fraudulent reports by increasing investment during fraud periods. We show that this finding is not driven by frauds that have a higher ex ante likelihood of detection or by an...

The computation of implied cost of capital (ICC) is constrained by the lack of analyst forecasts for half of all firms. Hou, van Dijk, and Zhang (2012, HVZ) present a cross-sectional model to generate forecasts in order to compute ICC. However, the forecasts from the HVZ model perform worse than...

Prior research documents a negative link between risk and executive holding of stock (positive link observed for options). We find a similar negative relation for non-executive holding of stock. Our finding is consistent with the view that non-executives not only face significant incentives to...

In this study, we examine the interplay between public environmental enforcement and private lender monitoring and its effects on borrowers’ environmental activities. To capture lender environmental monitoring, we use environmental covenants in loan agreements that require borrowers to take...

We use a novel dataset that links audit-firm and client-firm financial statement information from the U.K.’s largest audit firms to examine drivers of audit-firm profitability and its implications for audit outcomes conveyed by Key Audit Matter (KAM) disclosures. We first explore the...

Gray markets arise when an intermediary buys a product in a lower-priced, often emerging market and resells it to compete with the product’s original manufacturer in a higher-priced, more developed market. Evidence suggests that gray markets make the original manufacturer worse off globally by...