At a time when distrust of corporate management is at an all-time high and the media are increasing their focus on corporate governance, Standard amp; Poor's has published a study that examines the transparency and disclosure (Tamp;D) practices of major public companies around the globe. This...

The 1964 Securities Acts Amendments extended the mandatory disclosure requirements that had applied to listed firms since 1934 to large firms traded Over-the-Counter (OTC). We find several pieces of evidence indicating that investors valued these disclosure requirements, two of which are...

Foreign companies listing on U.S. exchanges are required to report financial information under U.S. GAAP on Form 20-F using either Item 17 or Item 18 disclosure rules. These two disclosure rules differ in that Item 17 allows many exemptions from U.S. GAAP, while Item 18 requires disclosure of...

This paper examines the valuation implications of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions allowances. We posit that the value of a firm's bank of emission allowances has two components that are likely to be positively valued by the capital market: 1) an asset value component; and 2) a real option value...

The SEC decided in 2007 to allow foreign private issuers who use IFRS as promulgated by the IASB (pure IFRS filers, hereafter) to stop providing reconciliations to US GAAP. Some opposed the measure because the limited academic literature available at the time indicated that the reconciliation is...

In the past six years, the average number of industries (2-digit SIC) serviced by audit offices in the United States has grown by 20% and the number of industries where the office has specialization has fallen by 40% (Data Source: Audit Analytics). This suggests a trend away from specialization...

The rise of stock indexing has raised concerns that index investing impedes arbitrage and degrades price discovery. This paper uses Russell’s reconstitution to identify the causal effect of index investing on information arbitrage and price discovery. While index investing has no discernible...

This paper theoretically examines the impact of conservatism on the asset price in an asset market allowing for strategic interactions among traders. Due to the trades coming from conservatism traders contain less informational content, the asset price is shown to be less informative in the...

The winner-takes-all business model followed by many U.S. Internet firms predicts that spending on intangibles will exhibit increasing profitability returns-to-scale. That is, larger expenditures should be more profitable per dollar of investment than small expenditures because larger...

We use incremental and joint implementation of multiple SOX-based control effectiveness disclosure and audit mandates to assess relative performance of alternatives for small U.S. public companies. Using data from several low and high effort management disclosure and audit regimes implemented...