It is widely agreed that corporate financial reports provide deficient information about intangible assets. However, investors are exposed to substantial information beyond financial reports, such as managers' direct communications to capital markets and analysts' reports. We ask: To what extent...

"FRS 10" requires investments in player contracts by football companies to be capitalized and amortized. Given the high degree of uncertainty associated with such contracts, it is not clear that this treatment is consistent with asset capitalization criteria. The evidence provided in this paper...

An important aim of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX) was to reduce the cost of capital by enhancing auditor independence. However, prior literature has argued that SOX has been ineffective in meeting this objective. We contribute to this debate by first providing evidence suggesting that auditor...

We estimate the association of investments in R&D and in physical assets (CAPEX) with subsequent earnings variability. We estimate these relations in different time periods and across industries. We find that R&D contributes to subsequent earnings variability more than CAPEX only in relative...

Unique proprietary data on Swedish board members reveal that a non-trivial proportion of board members in Swedish listed firms have been convicted of serious crimes. Analyzing the data shows that board members with personal fraudulent behavior are more likely to be males than females. We also...

Revenues and expenses are fundamentally proportional to one another, but are likely to be disproportionally affected by transitory items or economic shocks. We build on this observation and propose a new measure of sustainable earnings based on deviations from normal profit margins. While some...

An analysis of a proprietary dataset reveals that non-trivial proportions of directors, Chief Executive Officers (CEOs) and Chief Financial Officers in Swedish listed companies have been convicted or suspected of crimes. Based on prior literature, we argue that directors and senior executives...

We propose a measure of managerial ability, based on managers' efficiency in generating revenues, which is available for a large sample of firms and outperforms existing ability measures. We find that our measure is strongly associated with manager fixed effects and that the stock price...