This study examines whether application of IFRS by non-US firms results in accounting amounts comparable to those resulting from application of US GAAP by US firms. IFRS firms have greater accounting system and value relevance comparability with US firms when IFRS firms apply IFRS than when they...

We revisit evidence whether incentives or IFRS drive earnings quality changes, analyzing a large sample of German firms in the period from 1998 to 2008. Consistent with previous studies we find that voluntary and mandatory adopters differ distinctively in terms of essential firm characteristics...

Based on extant literature, we review the positive theory of GAAP. The theory predicts that GAAP's principal focus is on control (performance measurement and stewardship) and that verifiability and conservatism are critical features of a GAAP shaped by market forces. We recognize the advantage...

We study a sample of Continental European firms for changes in the sensitivity of their CEO turnover to their foreign peers' accounting performance around the mandatory adoption of International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS). We find a post-adoption increase in the use of Relative...

We estimate a firm-year measure of accounting conservatism, examine its empirical properties as a metric, and illustrate applications by testing new hypotheses that shed further light on the nature and effects of conservatism. The results are consistent with the measure, C_Score, capturing...

This paper provides early but broad empirical evidence on a major new investor protection regulation in Europe, MiFID II, which requires investment firms to unbundle investment research from other costs they charge to clients. We predict that the price separation resulting from unbundling and a...

We examine bankruptcy within business groups. Groups have incentives to support financially distressed subsidiaries as the bankruptcy of a subsidiary may impose severe costs on the group as a whole. In several countries around the world, bankruptcy courts often “pierce the corporate veil”...

We examine changes in cross-country financial statement comparability around mandatory IFRS adoption and the effects of these changes on firms' information environments, as captured by analyst properties and bid-ask spreads. First, we show that cross-country earnings comovement is negatively...

We examine how equity-market frictions that restrict pessimistic trading, such as short-sale constraints, affect assessments of default risk. We find that these frictions decrease the usefulness of equity-market variables for identifying defaulting firms but increase their usefulness for...

We examine whether more sophisticated accounting methods (in the form of accrual accounting) interacts with other information sources and the pledging of collateral to reduce information asymmetries between small business borrowers and lenders, thereby lowering borrowers' probability of loan...