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...

This paper investigates the driver of asset growth to explain the cross-country variation of the asset growth effect. We find that institutional restrictions on equity financing constrain firms' abilities to grow assets, and the degree of such restrictions is associated with the observed...

This study examines the role of market efficiency on international differences in the usefulness of the implied cost of capital (ICC) to measure expected stock returns. The analysis exploits cross-country differences in market efficiency around the world using a variety of empirical measures of...

I find both U.S. and international evidence that aggregate corporate cash savings strongly negatively predict future excess market returns. In the U.S. stock market, market timing based on aggregate cash savings yields annual returns 2.55% higher than an all-equity-all-the-time strategy. The...

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...

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...

We analyze the quality of forward-looking information in the management reports (MR) of listed German corporations and the impact of differences in that quality on analysts' behaviour. For several years, German corporations are bounded to provide forward-looking information separately for the...

We use a variance decomposition approach to examine why aggregate valuation ratios differ across countries. In a cross section of 22 developed countries from 1980 to 2009, we find that 50% of all cross-country differences in the aggregate price-to-book ratio (P/B) can be explained by...

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 information transfer regarding how investors react to new foreign macroeconomic and industry-related information embedded in foreign firms’ earnings releases. Using non-U.S. firms listed in the U.S. as our main setting, we find that U.S. investors react significantly to...