While there has been significant progress in the measurement of an organization's environmental and social impacts from their operations, metrics to evaluate the impact of products once they come to market lag far behind. In this paper we provide a framework for systematic measurement of product...

Using a dataset covering 3 million commercial borrower financial statements, we document a substantial, nearly monotonic decline in banks’ use of attested financial statements (AFS) in lending over the past two decades. Two market forces help explain this trend. First, technological advances...

Reduziert eine IFRS-Umstellung die Informationsdefizite der Fremdkapitalgeber und somit auch die Risikoprämie von Unternehmensanleihen? Entgegen bisherigen empirischen Untersuchungen betrachten wir den Zusammenhang zwischen Offenlegung und Kapitalkosten für Fremdfinanzierung. Folglich...

We analyse to what extent the accrual anomaly is related to the choice of the accounting system as well as firm-level heterogeneity in corporate governance mechanisms. Using a unique dataset of listed German firms over the period 1995 to 2005 we first corroborate former results indicating that...

The German Commercial Code ("HGB") allows banks to build visible reserves for general banking risks according to section 340g HGB. These "GBR reserves" may, in addition to their risk provisioning function, be used to enhance capital endowment, for internal financing, signaling or earnings...

In today's uncertain financial climate it is particularly important for entities to explain their financial performance relative to their expectations. Therefore, the paper analyzes the quality and quantity of management reporting in Germany's publicly traded MDAX and SDAX companies using a...

Compelling empirical evidence documenting a material effect of corporate taxes on leverage decisions is limited, in part because of difficulties in constructing an effective proxy for the firm's tax benefit of debt. We examine leverage decisions across taxable and nontaxable real estate firms...

This paper examines the effect of accounting conservatism on firm-level investment during the 2007-2008 global financial crisis. Using a differences-in-differences design, we find that firms with less conservative financial reporting experienced a sharper decline in investment activity following...

Much attention has been paid to the large decreases in value of non-agency residential mortgage-backed securities (RMBS) during the financial crisis. Many observers have argued that the fall in prices was partly driven by decreased liquidity and fire sales. We investigate whether capital...