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...

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...

Using an extensive database of 356,463 sell-side equity analysts' reports from 2002 to 2009, this study is one of the first to analyze the readability of analysts' reports. We first examine the determinants of variations in analyst report readability. Using several proxies for ability, we show...

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...

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...

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...

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 examine whether empirical results using text-based sentiment of U.S. annual reports depend on the underlying context, within documents, from which sentiment is measured. We construct a clause-level measure of context, showing that sentiment is driven by many different contexts and that...

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...