We show that tests of market efficiency are sensitive to the inclusion of delisting firm-years. When included, trading strategy returns based on anomaly variables can increase (for strategies based on earnings, cash flows and the book-to-market ratio) or decrease (for a strategy based on...

Financial reporting around the time of IPOs is consistent with listed firms reporting more conservatively than previously as private firms, consistent with the results in Ball and Shivakumar (2005). We hypothesize that IPO firms supply the higher quality financial reports demanded by public...

Both bond rating agencies and equity analysts evaluate public companies and report their findings and opinions to market participants. Regulation Fair Disclosure (FD) changed the dynamics of the market and placed restrictions on the information that companies could disclose to analysts. Debt...

The introduction of the Altman's Z-score model in 1983 and much recently the Enyi's Relative Solvency Ratio model in 2005 has divergently provided financial analysts with alternative methods of analyzing corporate solvency which hitherto was exclusively done using the traditional historical...

This paper analyses and ascertains the use of intellectual capital (IC) concepts in the process of credit risk assessment. Traditionally, only financial measures were incorporated in the credit risk assessment. In the knowledge-based economy, financial statements no longer provide sufficient...

This paper estimates the impact of accounting transparency on the term structure of CDS spreads for a large cross-section of firms. Using a newly developed measure of accounting transparency in Berger, Chen amp; Li (2006), we find a downward-sloping term structure of transparency spreads....

In this paper, we investigate how the fraction of the loan retained by the lead arranger of a syndicated loan deal is affected by the informativeness of the borrower's accounting information relative to credit quality, after controlling for the direct use of accounting variables in the formal...

Using a hazard model, we examine secular changes in the ability of financial statement data to predict bankruptcy over a forty-year period. We identify three trends in financial reporting that could influence predictive ability with respect to bankruptcy: the increase in FASB standards, many of...

There are differences in how Freddie Mac's and Fannie Mae's accounting regimes account for their mortgage guarantee activity - an important part of their business. This diversity results from the accounting choices provided by the relevant, complex accounting guidance as well as differences in...

US public companies recently filed, for the second or third time, management and auditor reports on internal control as required by Section 404 of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 (404 reports). This Special Comment summarizes our experience and findings on the credit implications of these reports