This article examines the relationship between aggregate earnings and returns (ERC) in a global context. We examine a broad international sample of countries which encompass markets with different levels of stock market development, shareholder protection and legal origin. Recent literature...

This study documents the publicly traded equity Real Estate Investment Trust (REIT) universe during the modern REIT era (early 1990s through the present). We show the growth and consolidation of the industry, changes in property type focus, increases in institutional ownership, and the growth of...

Do managers exercise accounting discretion in an opportunistic or efficient manner? Good governance structures, which mitigate agency costs, are necessary to ensure that the accounting information supplied by management is not opportunistically manipulated. The output of quality accounting...

Quarterly earnings conference calls are becoming a more pervasive tool for corporate disclosure. However, the extent to which the market embeds information contained in the tone (i.e. sentiment) of conference call wording is unknown. Using computer aided content analysis, we examine the...

Income smoothing is defined as the deliberate normalization of income in order to reach a desired trend. If the smoothing causes more information to be reflected in the stock price, it is likely to improve the allocation of resources and can be a critical factor in investment decisions. This...

Taxation can be considered central to corporate finance theory, where it contributes to the determination of capital structure, dividend policy and valuation of the firm. However, it plays little role in the developments of market finance theory, financial investment analysis or asset and...

This paper proposes and tests the hypothesis that takeover vulnerability contributes to short-term price reversal by motivating investors to trade speculatively and also by making investors demand immediacy in their trades. That is, takeover vulnerability is hypothesized to amplify two channels...

We use price pressure resulting from purchases by mutual funds with large capital inflows to identify overvalued equity. This is a relatively exogenous overvaluation indicator as it is associated with who is buying, buyers with excess liquidity, rather than what is being purchased. We document...

We assess returns and risks to private equity investors from 35 countries for the time interval of 1996-2008. We find that returns to private equity (measured as return on book equity (ROE)) are significantly higher than ROEs to publicly traded equity. Using customary measures to adjust for...

Do managers exercise accounting discretion in an opportunistic or efficient manner? Good governance structures, which mitigate agency costs, are necessary to ensure that the accounting information supplied by management is not opportunistically manipulated. The output of quality accounting...