This paper examines how commonly used earnings quality measures fulfill a key objective of financial reporting, i.e., improving decision usefulness for investors. We propose a stock-price-based measure for assessing the quality of earnings quality measures. We predict that firms with higher...

This paper analyses the effects of pre-trade transparency on market quality in an experimental open limit order book preceded by a market for information. The design of the trading game is akin to the system in use in an increasing number of financial markets. We find that the disclosure of...

Market makers are financial intermediaries who are supposed to provide additional liquidity, but do not have any information-related obligation. This paper studies the unique case of the Italian Stock Exchange, where market makers are also obliged to facilitate information disclosure about the...

Motivated by the availability of high-frequency data on trading activity, this paper proposes the use of order aggressiveness as a metric to evaluate the usefulness of accounting information. I test, through an analysis of order aggressiveness, whether earnings announcements of firms listed on...

Trading venues often impose a minimum trade unit constraint (MTUC) to facilitate order execution. This paper examines the effects of a natural experiment at Borsa Italiana where the exchange reduced the MTUC to one share for all stocks. After the removal of the MTUC, we observe a substantial...

The UK's Accounting Standards Board and the European Financial Reporting Advisory Group have published a discussion paper entitled ‘Considering the Effects of Accounting Standards’. While the effort to think through potential consequences of proposed regulatory acts in advance is welcome, we...

It has long been recognised that accounting regulation is not a mere technical exercise but one that takes place in a political context and lobbying has been examined in numerous empirical studies. Most of these studies address lobbying of the accounting standard setter. However, standard...

The hypothesis that political costs caused by the regulatory process impact upon accounting has been tested extensively and has found considerable empirical support. However, most studies use data from the United States. Whether the conclusions carry over to different institutional settings is...

I examine the conditions under which entrepreneurs signal the high quality of their projects by cross-listing their firms in a jurisdiction with stricter enforcement of financial reporting regulation. I analyze the effect of these cross-listing decisions on international earnings quality, using...

This paper analyses the effects of stricter financial reporting enforcement on capital allocation and reporting quality in a game-theoretic model and derives conclusions about optimal enforcement strictness. Analysis of the model shows that reporting quality strictly increases with tighter...