Purpose: In recent years, significant research has focused on the question of whether severe market periods are accompanied by herding behavior. As herding behavior is a considerable cause of the speculative bubble and leads to stock market deviations from their basic...

This paper investigates the usage, determinants and earnings effect of special purpose entities based on a large sample of firms from 1994 to 2004. We find that SPE use has grown substantially in recent years and that the number of SPEs is related to economic motivations, financial reporting...