We contribute to the earnings management literature and provide insights for accounting regulatorsby investigating the impact of FRS3 on accruals management by UK firms. FRS3 mandated net incomeper share, whilst allowing the release of incremental information on sustainable profitability....

We use multivariate regime switching vector autoregressive models to characterize the time-varyinglinkages among the Irish stock market, one of the top world performers of the 1990s, and the US andUK stock markets. We ¯nd that two regimes, characterized as bear and bull states, are required...

A growing number of studies in finance decompose multi-period buy-and-hold portfolioreturns into a series of single period returns. The method used to decomposethese returns is important because researchers use them in tests of asset pricing modelsand market efficiency and in evaluating the...

The long memory characteristic of financial market volatility is well documentedand has important implications for volatility forecasting and optionpricing. When fitted to the same data, different volatility models calculate theunconditional variance differently and could have very different...

This paper provides new UK evidence on the relationship between managerialincentives and firm risk using a hand-collected database of 3307 executive yearobservations (698 CEO years and 2609 other executive years). We find that therelation between pay performance sensitivity and firm risk...

We find that the decision by a potential acquirer to complete or cancel an announced acquisitionproposal is sensitive to new information generated after the announcement of the acquisition.Both the acquirer and target’s cumulative abnormal returns (CAR) over different windows afterthe...

This paper examines the effect of using different option valuation models to calculatethe fair market value of Executive Stock Options (ESOs) granted to executivedirectors of UK firms. Our key objective is to demonstrate empirically that somecompanies will have greater incentive and benefit from...

Credit risk transition probabilities between aggregate portfolio classes constitute a very useful tool when individual transition data are not available. Jones (2005) estimates Markovian Credit Transition Matrices using an adjusted least squares method. Given the arguments of Judge and Takayama...

Despite the rapid rise in cross-border mergers and acquisitions in the past twenty years, there has been little attention paid to what determines their patterns and, in particular, what influences their behaviour over time. Employing a panel database this paper models the behaviour of foreign...

We value UK executive stock options (ESOs) as American options that areawarded conditional on the probability of the holders achieving some performancecriteria. Unlike the standard Black and Scholes (BS) model, which is universally usedboth in the literature and practice, this provides a more...