This study examines the unintended effects of a pre-Reg FD practice that gave a broad group of sophisticated market participants 15-minute earlier access to all corporate press releases than the general public. We find that this priority dissemination practice contributed to 22 percent of the...

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...

We study the behavior of short sellers as informed market participants and examine potential sources of their information. Using a newly available dataset with high-frequency short sales data, we find evidence of significant increases in short sales immediately prior to large insider sales, but...

This study examines the effect of the Jumpstart Our Business Startups Act (JOBS Act) on information uncertainty in IPO firms. The JOBS Act creates a new category of issuer, the Emerging Growth Company (EGC), and exempts EGCs from several disclosures required for non-EGCs. Our findings are...

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...

We compare various earnings attributes of two accounting standards in one regulatory environment. We consider all firms that file Form 20-F reconciliations from IFRS to USGAAP with the SEC for 2004-2006. We find USGAAP and IFRS share many earnings attributes with two notable exceptions: USGAAP...

This paper investigates whether U.S. regulatory actions around reverse mergers have exerted any spillover effects on the Chinese firms listed in China and whether Chinese firms have exhibited lower financial reporting quality than their U.S. counterparts. To test the possible spillover effect,...

In their joint framework project, the FASB and the IASB recently proposed dropping stewardship as a separate objective of financial accounting, because the Boards view stewardship and valuation usefulness as compatible sub-objectives ranking under an overall objective of decision usefulness....

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...

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...