We compare characteristics of municipal debt issues in states that mandate GAAP for municipalities with issues in states that impose no annual financial disclosure requirements. Cross-sectional comparisons indicate that the use of public (versus private) debt is greater, and municipal debt costs...

The SEC's emphasis on the use of plain English is designed to make disclosures more readable and more informative. Using an experiment, I find that more readable disclosures lead to stronger reactions from small investors, so that changes in valuation judgments are more positive when news is...

This paper examines the disclosure of intangible assets by 'high user' industrial firms in the Australian market subsequent to the introduction in 2005 of AASB 136 and AASB 138. Using a sample of ten large industrial firms with combined intangible assets of $37,758 million as at 2006, the paper...

We investigate whether clear disclosure of comprehensive income (CI) facilitates detection of earnings management by buy-side financial analysts and predictably affects their security price judgments. Because analysts and investors often must sort through voluminous footnotes and non-financial...

The current study examines the voluntary disclosures (provided in the U.S.) by U.S.-listed Asian companies. Our findings indicate that significantly fewer [greater] voluntary disclosures are provided by U.S.-listed Asian companies from countries which have a strict [less strict] mandatory...

This study investigates the effectiveness of changes in the regulatory environment on the quality of compliance to mandatory disclosure requirements in Bangladesh. Statistical analysis of the Mandatory Disclosure Index, as developed in this paper using annual reports of the exchange-listed firms...

To increase investor awareness of the sensitivity of financial statements to the methods, assumptions, and estimates underlying their preparation, the Securities and Exchange Commission proposed that firms include disclosures about critical accounting policies in their 10-Ks. Using a large...

Early empirical studies find a negative association between firm performance and shareholder activism, whereas more recent studies document a positive association. We argue and theoretically show that this change in behavior results from mandating executive compensation disclosure. We develop a...

This paper examines how the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) intervention in 2003 regarding non-GAAP disclosures affects the reporting of Funds from Operations (FFO), an industry-guided non-GAAP performance measure commonly reported by Real Estate Investment Trusts (REIT). We find...

This paper uses firms' disclosures of internal control problems prior to audits mandated by Section 404 of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX) to investigate the economic factors that expose firms to internal control failure risks and managements' incentives to discover and report internal control...