We investigate agency variation in credit quality assessment (Standard and Poor's vs. Moody's vs. Fitch) employing sovereign ratings data for 129 countries, spanning the period 1990-2006. While we find that the credit rating agencies often disagree about credit quality, it is usually confined to...

<link rid="b20">Stoughton and Zechner (1998)</link> and <link rid="b4">Brennan and Franks (1997)</link> argue that underpricing can be employed to determine post IPO ownership structure, and thereby to influence monitoring and/or control of the company post issue. This paper employs unique data relating to shareholdings of firms listing on...

Trueman (1986) argues that an entrepreneur might signal the quality of his information about a firm's investment projects by disclosing the extent to which external capital raised is to be applied to capital expenditure. This article argues that, via Trueman's theory, a higher level of disclosed...

Utilising a unique dataset of 502 UK IPOs we undertake an empirical analysis of the relationship between underpricing and value gains on flotation. We find support for our hypothesis that IPO underpricing is related to the extent of anticipated value gains on the private to public transition. We...

The identification, management and disclosure of risks have been the subject of recent legislation, directives and reporting standards issued across a number of international jurisdictions. To inform the disclosure debate, this paper provides a detailed analysis of the risk warning disclosures...

A number of recent papers examine the relationship between default risk and equity returns, and the results are mixed. These studies employ different measures of default risk and we find that correlations between eight diverse measures of default risk tend to be less than 50%. Nonetheless, we...

The core goal of this study is to empirically investigate whether there is a “world price” of corporate sustainability. This is assessed in the context of standard asset pricing models—in particular, by asking whether a risk premium attaches to a sustainability factor after controlling for...

We present an analysis of the determinants of Asia-Pacific banks’ extent of derivative activities. Our findings suggest that the probability of financial distress and economies of scale arguments are important in this regard. Further analyses reveal that Asia-Pacific dealer banks tend to use...