Accounting is sometimes seen just as a veil leaving the economic fundamentals unaffected. Indeed, in the context of completely frictionless markets, where assets trade in fully liquid markets and there are no problems of perverse incentives, accounting would be irrelevant since reliable market...

We investigate the assertion that fair valuation of financial instruments exacerbated the 2008 financial crisis. We focus on the 4th quarter of 2008 following the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy, the Reserve Primary fund “breaking the buck” and other adverse events. Our central finding is that...

There is tension underlying whether asset redeployability, which refers to the salability of corporate capital assets, shapes crash risk. On one hand, asset redeployability enables managers to opportunistically exploit asset sales to manage earnings upwards to hoard bad news, which, in turn,...

We document the emergence of “social executives,” top executives who connect with investors directly, personally, and in real time through social media, and we study the consequences of this development for financial markets. We contend that the emergence of social executives enables...

This paper investigates how the disclosure tone of earnings conference calls predicts future stock price crash risk. Using U.S. public firm earnings conference call transcripts from 2010 to 2015, we find that firms exhibiting more pessimistic tone during the current year-end call experience...

Institutional investors’ common blockholdings within an industry produce an information advantage, allowing them to differentiate between the industry-wide and firm-specific nature of bad news released by peer firms and avoiding selling on false spillover signals (i.e., “panic exit”),...

We propose to investigate a possible relationship between analysts' busyness and stock price crash risk. Previous empirical evidence suggests that analysts' busyness plays a key role in forecast accuracy. However, we did not find studies that seeks to analyze how busyness alters the monitoring...

Critics argue that the “fair value” provisions in U.S. accounting rules exacerbated the recent financial crisis by depleting banks' regulatory capital, which curtailed lending and triggered asset sales, leading to further economic turmoil. Defenders counter-argue that the role of fair value...

I identify issues that bank regulators need to consider if fair value accounting is used for determining bank regulatory capital and when making regulatory decisions. In financial reporting, US and international accounting standard setters have issued several disclosure and measurement and...