Whether fair value accounting should be used in financial reporting has been the subject of debate for many years. A key dimension to this debate is whether fair value earnings can provide information to financial statement users that is helpful in making their economic decisions. A criticism of...

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...

I investigate how investors value tax planning and tax uncertainty for the case of publicly listed German firms. I compare two recent approaches how to account for tax uncertainty: the separate view by Drake et al. (2019) and the composite view by Jacob and Schütt (2020) to find the better...

When firms are forced to publicly disclose financial information, credit rating agencies are supposed to improve their risk assessments. Theory predicts such an information quality effect but also an adverse reputational concerns effect because credit analysts may become increasingly concerned...

Anonymous and unannounced site inspections known as "Mystery Shopping" (MS) are common in multi-site service firms, but little is known about the strategic importance of this practice. We conceptualize MS as a monitoring tool firms use to implement the optimal allocation of site resources...

This paper examines the reliance on ESG metrics in executive compensation contracts. In our sample of international publicly traded firms, a rapidly growing fraction incorporate ESG metrics in the compensation schemes of their top executives. Our analysis links the reliance on these metrics to...

Current corporate disclosures regarding carbon emissions lack commonly accepted accounting rules. The accrual accounting system for carbon emissions described here is grounded in the rules of historical cost accounting for operating assets, enabling the preparation of balance sheets and flow...

In this study, we use advance tax rulings (ATR) to investigate the impact of fee-based tax certainty on risky investment decisions of a firm under both cash flow and tax uncertainty. We model and analyze the multi-dimensional nature of tax uncertainty from tax reforms and tax audits in expected...

We investigate the impact of uneven transparency regulation across countries and industries on the location of economic activity. Using two distinct sources of regulatory variation-the varying extent of financial-reporting requirements and the staggered introduction of electronic business...