We investigate agency variation in credit quality assessment (Standard and Poor's vs. Moody's vs. Fitch) employing sovereign ratings data for 129 countries, spanning the period 1990-2006. While we find that the credit rating agencies often disagree about credit quality, it is usually confined to...

Trueman (1986) argues that an entrepreneur might signal the quality of his information about a firm's investment projects by disclosing the extent to which external capital raised is to be applied to capital expenditure. This article argues that, via Trueman's theory, a higher level of disclosed...

A number of recent papers examine the relationship between default risk and equity returns, and the results are mixed. These studies employ different measures of default risk and we find that correlations between eight diverse measures of default risk tend to be less than 50%. Nonetheless, we...

The identification, management and disclosure of risks have been the subject of recent legislation, directives and reporting standards issued across a number of international jurisdictions. To inform the disclosure debate, this paper provides a detailed analysis of the risk warning disclosures...

<link rid="b20">Stoughton and Zechner (1998)</link> and <link rid="b4">Brennan and Franks (1997)</link> argue that underpricing can be employed to determine post IPO ownership structure, and thereby to influence monitoring and/or control of the company post issue. This paper employs unique data relating to shareholdings of firms listing on...