We study the relative strengths and weaknesses of principles based and rules based systems of regulation. In the principles based systems there is clarity about the regulatory objectives but the process of reverse-engineer these objectives into meaningful compliance at the firm level is...

This paper studies earnings management and forecast guidance activities of European banks between 2004 and 2008. Using 22,564 analyst forecasts for 55 banks we find that the proportion of banks hitting or beating analyst consensus fell from 68.22% pre-crisis to 28.13% during the crisis. Banks...