Accounting for defined benefit pension plans is complex, and given the magnitude of many of these schemes relative to their corporate sponsor, understanding whether pension disclosures are value relevant is key to improving the quality of financial reports. The application of fair value...

This paper examines the effect of Korea's fair disclosure regulation on the timeliness and informativeness of earnings announcements. The present regulation for Korean listed firms requires that if a company's sales revenue, operating income (or loss) and net income (or loss) have changed by...

I examine how mandatory disclosure of fiscal payment information in developed countries affects fiscal revenue contributions and investments by multinational firms in less developed countries. In Europe and Canada, extractive firms have to publicly disclose their payments to foreign host...

At the peak of the financial crisis in October 2008, the IASB amended IAS 39 to grant companies the option of abandoning fair value recognition for selected financial assets. Using a comprehensive global sample of publicly listed IFRS banks, we find that banks use the reclassification option to...

We analyze a comprehensive sample of more than 10,000 U.S. OTC stocks. We first show that the OTC market is a large, diverse, and dynamic trading environment with a rich set of regulatory and disclosure regimes, comprising venue rules and state laws beyond SEC regulation. We then exploit this...

This paper is concerned with the allegation that fair value accounting rules have contributed significantly to the recent financial crisis. It focuses on one particular channel for that contribution: the impact of fair value on actual or potential failure of banks. The paper compares four...

The SEC decided in 2007 to allow foreign private issuers who use IFRS as promulgated by the IASB (pure IFRS filers, hereafter) to stop providing reconciliations to US GAAP. Some opposed the measure because the limited academic literature available at the time indicated that the reconciliation is...

In 2002, the Financial Accounting Standards Board allowed corporations to recognize stock options as an expense on their financial statements on a voluntary basis. Option expensing became mandatory in 2004. This investigation uses two different models to reexamine the effects of the announcement...

This paper examines insider trading around first-time debt covenant violation disclosures in SEC filings, and is interesting from a research and regulatory standpoint for three reasons – delay and infrequency of a first-time disclosure, lack of attention to covenant disclosures by regulators,...

Real earnings management (REM) practices are related to subsequent stock returns. Specifically, stocks of firms with abnormally low (high) levels of operating cash flows underperform (outperform) in the subsequent year, whereas stocks of firms with abnormally low (high) levels of production...