This study investigates whether culture in general and religion in particular mitigate earnings management. Using a cross-country data set, empirical tests based on rank regressions indicate that earnings management is unrelated to both religious affiliation and the degree of religiosity. In...

This study explores how legal institutions have the potential to change economic development outcomes. Talmudic law ostensibly precludes the transfer (sale) of intangible assets and intangible rights thereby limiting an agricultural society's ability to hedge risks and to raise financing. We...

This study examines the private debt contracting relation between performance covenants and conservative accounting under asymmetric information. Asymmetric information is characterized by borrowers' proclivity to appropriate wealth from lenders to themselves. We find that accounting...

We examine whether domestic or foreign earnings contribute more to the variability of unexpected stock returns for a sample of U.S. multinationals and consider the role of investor sophistication. We use a variance decomposition methodology that measures the contribution of each earnings...

This study evaluates the impact of earnings on credit risk in the Credit Default Swap (CDS) market using levels, changes, and event study analyses. We find that earnings (cash flows, accruals) of reference firms are negatively and significantly correlated with the level of CDS premia, consistent...

This paper analyzes the relation between equity prices and conditional conservatism and introduces a new measure of conservatism at the firm-year level. We show that the asymmetric properties of conservative accounting, the existence of non-accounting sources of information, and the properties...

This paper examines the importance of foreign earnings relative to domestic earnings for a sample of U.S. multinationals using variance decomposition. Our methodology represents an alternative and complementary approach over the prior literature, which is based on traditional regressions and...

This study extends the accounting-based valuation framework of Ohlson (1995) and Feltham and Ohlson (1999) to incorporate dynamic expectations about the level of systematic risk in the economy. Our model explains recent empirical findings documenting a strong negative association between changes...

This study extends the accounting-based valuation framework of Ohlson (1995) and Feltham and Ohlson (1999) to incorporate dynamic expectations about the level of systematic risk in the economy. Our model explains recent empirical findings documenting a strong negative association between changes...

This study compares the pricing of credit risk information conveyed by accounting numbers under IFRS relative to local GAAP. We measure the price of credit risk by CDS spreads and focus on three fundamental accounting metrics that inform about credit risk: earnings, leverage and book value...