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...

We investigate the effect of firm size on the market's short-window response to annual earnings announcements for a large sample of Australian listed companies. Our research design involves regressions of unexpected earnings against unexpected returns. Non-linearity in the returns-earnings...

Purpose – This study aims to test the effects of forecast specificity on the asymmetric short-window share market response to management earnings forecasts (MEF). Design/methodology/approach – The paper examines a large sample of hand-checked Australian data over the period 1994 to 2001....

Using multiple discriminant analysis, we construct an index that measures firms' external financial constraints in an Australian setting. We form portfolios of firms based on our financial constraints index and find that financially constrained firms earn lower return than their unconstrained...

We test whether default risk is related to equity returns using the Fama and MacBeth [Fama, E.F., MacBeth, J., 1973. Risk, return, and equilibrium: empirical tests. Journal of Political Economy 81, 607-636.] regression framework. The proxy we use for default risk is the default probability...

The empirical literature suggests that several different variables are potentially important in explaining the return on gold stocks beyond that of a market factor. The primary aim of this paper is to examine the empirical performance of a specification which incorporates into one multifactor...