This paper examines the effects of audit firm mergers and the demise of Andersens on market concentration, competitiveness and audit pricing in the UK. Our results indicate that the large audit firms increased their market share between 1985 and 2002 by merging and expanding into new sectors....

We show that book-to-market, size, and momentum capture cross-sectional variation in exposures to a broad set of macroeconomic factors identified in the prior literature as potentially important for pricing equities. The factors considered include innovations in economic growth expectations,...

We combine the innovative approaches of Elliott, Komunjer, and Timmermann (2005) and Patton and Timmermann (2007) with a block bootstrap to analyze whether asymmetric loss functions can rationalize the S&P 500 return expectations of individual forecasters from the Livingston Surveys. Although...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to investigate how the turnover-performance relation depends on the proportion of outside directors and institutional ownership concentration and to explore the relative roles of accounting- and stock-based performance measures in the process of CEO...

Recent research by Gu and Wu (2003) and Basu and Markov (2004) suggests that the well-known optimism bias in analysts' earnings forecasts is attributable to analysts minimizing symmetric, linear loss functions when the distribution of forecast errors is skewed. An alternative explanation for...