We compare the effectiveness of financial statement variables and pre-determined lists of suspicious words with an alternative approach to fraud detection. Using the text of the Management Discussion and Analysis section from 10-Q and 10-K reports, we allow the data to identify words most...

Credit rating agencies have been heavily criticized both for providing overly optimistic ratings for structured finance products and the timeliness of their rating changes for financial institutions hit hard by the 2007 to 2009 crisis. While the role of rating agencies in the structured finance...

Over the past ten years, credit rating agencies have come under intense criticism from both practitioners and academics, first for their failure to identify problems resulting in bankruptcies at Enron and Worldcom and second for providing overly optimistic ratings for structured finance...

I examine how a country's financial system influences assessments of firm-level risk. Consistent with theories of financial intermediation, I hypothesize that firms located in a country with a bank-oriented financial system will be perceived as posing a lower credit risk than otherwise similar...

I examine whether bond rating changes can be anticipated by investors and test if the stock price reaction to the eventual change varies as a result. All else equal, the market reaction to changes that could have been easily predicted should be significantly smaller than the reaction to changes...

Following the implementation of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, scholars argued that one-size-fits-all corporate governance imposed disproportionately high compliance costs on small businesses, weakening their competitiveness vis-à-vis larger firms. As an alternative, these critics contended that...

A common suggestion for facilitating cross-border investment is to partner with a firm in the target nation. Unfortunately, high quality partners are not always available. We hypothesize and test whether investment syndicates consisting of nationally diverse private equity (PE) investors provide...

We find that senior loan lender control is positively associated with a firm's corporate bond yield spread at issuance. A one standard deviation change in the number of covenants on the strictest loan on a firm's balance sheet is associated with a 15 basis points higher yield spread at bond...