This paper examines the relation between the corporate life cycle and lending spreads. Using a sample of 20,307 firm-loan observations spanning 5,076 publicly traded U.S. firms, we find that lending spreads follow a U-shape pattern across the life cycle phases. This pattern is in addition to the...

We examine the relation between legal, extra-legal and political institutional factors and earnings quality of banks across countries. We predict that earnings quality is higher in countries with legal, extra-legal and political systems that reduce the consumption of private control benefits by...

We examine the unintended consequences of the 2005 increase from $500 million to $1 billion in the asset threshold for the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation Improvement Act (FDICIA) internal control reporting requirements. We focus on a test sample of banks that increased their total assets...

We provide evidence that analyst coverage increases as accruals quality decreases. This finding is consistent with the services of financial analysts becoming more valuable and in greater demand as accruals provide weaker signals about future cash flows. Further, it is accruals quality...

We propose a method of measuring the comparability of reported accounting numbers from the perspective of creditors. Our measure reflects the relationship between market variables related to default probabilities and key accounting numbers of interest to lenders. We demonstrate that this measure...

We examine the effect of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX) on the extent of aggressive/conservative reporting behavior of public companies. SOX imposes considerably greater potential penalties on CEO/CFOs who engage in financial wrongdoing; therefore, risk averse managers are likely to report lower...

We examine the relationship between the quality of corporate governance and information asymmetry in the equity market around quarterly earnings announcements. We use the change in market liquidity (i.e., bid-ask spreads and depths) around the announcements as a proxy for information asymmetry....

We investigate the relations between changes in the precisions of public and private information and changes in market liquidity around earnings announcements. Increases in the precision of public information reduce information asymmetry, whereas increases in the precision of private information...