We examine how equity-market frictions that restrict pessimistic trading, such as short-sale constraints, affect assessments of default risk. We find that these frictions decrease the usefulness of equity-market variables for identifying defaulting firms but increase their usefulness for...

Over the past 12 years, financial analysts across the world have been optimistically wrong with their 12-month earnings forecasts by 25.3%. This study may be the first of its kind to assess analyst earnings forecast accuracy at all listed companies across the globe, covering 70 countries. A...

This study examines the predictive power of comprehensive income and its individual components within the homogenous institutional setting of German IFRS firms. The results could be relevant for the standard setters IASB and FASB and their joint project “Financial Statement Presentation”. We...

Corporate governance literature advances the idea that certain aspects of board of directors' structure improve monitoring of managerial decisions. Among these is the managers' decision to manage earnings. Prior studies have shown that earnings management, in widely-held public companies, is...

Using aggregate data from national accounts, we study whether strengthening and harmonizing securities regulation across the European Union increases household equity ownership. We find a significant increase in the proportion of liquid assets invested in equity, both when a household's own...

The purpose of this study is to investigate the impact of corporate internationalization, governance structures, and legal protections on the foreign earnings response coefficient (FERC). The FERC is a measure of the value-relevance of foreign earnings. We collected data on 3653 Taiwanese firms...

Previous literature investigates links between corporate social responsibility (CSR), earnings management (EM), and firm performance (FP) but has looked at pair-wise relations (CSR-EM, CSR-FP, and EM-FP) for one-way effects without considering endogeneity among the variables. We examine these...

When a sovereign faces the risk of debt default, it may be tempted to expropriate the private sector. This may be one reason why international investment in private companies has to take into account the sovereign risk. But the likelihood of sovereign risk transferring to corporates and...

When a sovereign faces the risk of debt default, it attempts to expropriate the private sector. But the likelihood of a transfer from the sovereign risk to corporate default risk can be mitigated by legal institutions that provide strong property rights protection. Using a novel credit default...

We analyze the role of political instability for the composition of foreign investment, whether it takes the form of a majority- or minority-owned investment. We focus on the instability generated by the change of the party in power rather than on the risk of changes of political regime or...