We examine a duopolistic setting in which firms pre-announce their future competitive decisions (e.g. prices, production quantities, capacity investments) before they actually undertake them. We show that firms overstate their future actions in their pre-announcements, and that their real action...

In the wake of the recent financial meltdown, financial reporting under both North American generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP) and international financial reporting standards (IFRS) has involved renewed attention to the structures and constraints of “mark-to-market” and similar...

The primary objective of this study is to construct a valid and reliable instrument to quantitatively measure the quality of internal audit function via level of conformance by internal auditors towards the International Professional Practice Framework (IPPF). Two separate pilot tests were...

This paper examines how the level of disaggregation in earnings forecasts influences investors' reactions to earnings surprises. Previous research finds that investors respond more favorably to a disaggregated forecast than to an aggregated one immediately after the forecast. However, given that...

Risk premium is a category that is commonly used in various models assisting decision making process, such as widely described in literature Capital Asset Pricing Model. Furthermore, as scientists describe, the risk premium is a factor that has a significant meaning for the whole economy, since...

In this study, we examine the effect of accrual-based earnings management on the association between managers' earnings forecast errors and accruals, which we label “managers' accrual-related forecast bias.” We build on extensive research which finds that managers engage in accrual-based...

The critical global role of audit firms, combined with the scarcity of qualified staff and downward pressure on fees, has increased the importance of understanding efficiency in this industry. This paper examines the technical and allocative inefficiencies of audit firm staffing using data from...

We examine the relation between passive ownership and financial reporting quality measured by Beneish's (1999) earnings' manipulation score (M-score). We find that passive ownership is negatively related to M-score and to the likelihood of being designated as a “manipulator” firm. However,...

In a recent survey of analysts, 96% claim that returns are not very useful as earnings forecast model inputs. I find, though, that analysts actually do incorporate returns into their earnings forecasts, even if those returns have no underlying earnings information. This leads to forecast error,...

Our study addresses whether integrated report quality, IRQ, is positively associated with greater price informativeness and the extent to which the greater price informativeness is diminished when firms have higher proprietary costs of disclosure. In integrated reports, firms integrate financial...