We examine the information role of accounting disclosures on warranties, utilizing a database that became available due to the requirements of FIN 45. First, because firms use warranty policies as a business strategy to promote their products, a warranty reserve can serve two roles: an...

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...

Numerous (high-tax) countries presume that multinational firms use their transfer-pricing policies to shift profits into countries with lower tax rates. To avoid the corresponding loss in tax revenues, tax authorities develop constantly tightening rules which limit the scope of transfer-price...

This paper studies two distinct roles that transfer prices play within multinational enterprises operating in two tax jurisdictions. Assuming that the multinational enterprise chooses one transfer price for tax purpose and another for providing incentives to its subsidiary's manager, we analyze...

Based on a large survey of firms in Norwegian industry, in line with earlier studies, we find that the majority (68.7%) use some form of cost based pricing. In contrast to earlier studies, variable cost is the dominant cost base (32%). Only about 20% of firms use fully distributed cost compared...

We examine whether it is incentives or standards that determine firms' financial reporting quality using a natural experiment in Taiwan. Before 2001, Taiwan's Company Act required private firms with capital levels exceeding a certain threshold to file and publish audited financial statements....

We suggest a full consolidation approach that takes into account the property rights structure whithin the subsidiaries, in particular, the majority requirements on restructurings. Our approach employs a property rights index based on cooperative game theory.

This paper examines the association between conservatism and the value relevance of accounting information over the 1975 through 2004 period. We measure conservatism using approaches developed in Penman and Zhang, The Accounting Review 77:237–264, (2002) and Beaver and Ryan, Journal of...

We study the optimal accounting policy of a financially constrained firm that pledges assets to raise debt capital for financing a risky project. The accounting system provides information about the value of the collateral. Absent accounting regulation, the optimal accounting system is...