We examine the effect of the use of fairness opinions by acquirers on acquirers' short-term market performance. Our paper is the first to examine the effect of using fairness opinions on acquirers' abnormal returns around merger announcements. We hypothesize that acquirers purchase fairness...

We examine a primary outcome of corporate governance, the ability to identify and terminate poorly performing CEOs, to test the effectiveness of U.S. investor protections in improving the corporate governance of cross-listed firms. We find that firms from weak investor protection regimes that...

In this paper we argue that information asymmetry between firm insiders and outside equity investors generates conservatism in financial statements. Conservatism reduces the manager's incentives and ability to manipulate accounting numbers and so reduces information asymmetry and the deadweight...

Contrary to Miller and Modigliani (1961), payout policy is not irrelevant and investment policy is not the sole determinant of value, even in frictionless markets. MM ask quot;Do companies with generous distribution policies consistently sell at a premium above those with niggardly payouts?quot;...

We examine whether conflicts of interest with investment banking and brokerage induce sell-side analysts to issue optimistic stock recommendations and, if so, whether investors are misled by such biases. Using quantitative measures of potential conflicts constructed from revenue breakdowns of...

We investigate incentives that led to the rash of restated financial statements at the end of the 1990s market bubble. We find the likelihood of a misstated financial statement increases greatly when the CEO has very sizable holdings of stock options quot;in-the-moneyquot; (i.e., stock price...

Accounting-based capital maintenance is a traditional feature of the Continental-European system of creditor protection, serving as a correlative of the limited liability enjoyed by shareholders of corporations. Due to recent developments at the EU regulatory level, this system has come under...

This paper analyses a problem at the intersection of accounting, law and economics: the economically efficient operation of legal arangements for company failure is undermined because valuations of assets and liabilities become unstable once a firm is distressed. The paper draws on the three...

Over the past decade, Romania's political, economic and social life where subordinated to one major objective: the transition from the pre-1990 centrally planned economic system to a market economy in the context of EU enlargement. The effective conduct of business is an issue of general...

We investigate the relationship of candidate information asymmetry measures to aspects of insiders' trades. For two of the measures, the median absolute abnormal return over past earnings announcements (MAG_AR) and whether the firm reports Ramp;D expenditures, associations are consistent with...