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 effect of income smoothing on information uncertainty, stock returns, and cost of equity. I show that income smoothing through both total accruals and discretionary accruals tends to reduce firms' information uncertainty, as measured by stock return volatility, analyst...

Many recent studies explore how earnings properties such as opacity, conservatism, and comparability relate to stock price crash risk. Motivated by the importance of earnings guidance as a voluntary disclosure mechanism that directly provides new information to the market, we investigate how...

We find a positive association between short-selling and accruals during 1988-2009, and that asymmetry between the long and short sides of the accrual anomaly is stronger when constraints on short-arbitrage are more severe (low availability of loanable shares as proxied by institutional...

We show that a lack of investor trust affects the revision of cash flow expectations and delays the incorporation of accounting information into the stock price. To overcome investors' dependence on trust, managers can obtain external certification—either through credit ratings or by employing...

While prior literature examines the role of auditors in the pricing of initial public offerings, little is known about the effect of auditor changes on the pricing of seasoned offers. Our examination of seasoned equity offerings shows that companies switching auditors prior to the offerings...

This study examines the value relevance of book value, earnings and dividends for a sample of all non-financial firms listed on the Kuwait Stock Exchange (KSE) over the period 2003–2009. After controlling for the impact of the global financial crisis, empirical results provide evidence on the...

In recent years, German companies report consolidated financial statements under German GAAP, U.S. GAAP, or International Accounting Standards (IAS). Market observers, researchers, and regulators have argued that financial statements prepared under the shareholder (or investor) model, such as...

This paper conducts an empirical investigation of the relationship between information asymmetry and real activities manipulation. When information asymmetry is high, stakeholders do not have sufficient resource, incentives, or access to relevant information to monitor manager‘s actions, which...

Since the opening of China’s securities market, there have been a number of bull and bear cycles. This paper discusses how executives use the market timing approach to manage earnings in different cycles to maximize firm value. We find that Chinese listed companies choose to release more...