Proponents of International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) argue that mandating a uniform set of accounting standards improves financial statement comparability that in turn attracts greater cross-border investment. Our study tests this assertion by examining the change in foreign mutual...

The purpose of this study is to investigate how bondholders' limited upside potential impacts the timeliness of the bond market reaction to bad news earnings surprises. We find that bond prices anticipate the majority of the information in bad news earnings surprises, but none of the information...

Recent research asserts that an essential feature of good corporate governance is strong investor protection, where investor protection is defined as both (1) the extent of the laws that protect investors' rights and (2) the strength of the legal institutions that facilitate law enforcement. The...

We find that analysts are more likely to provide cash flow forecasts in countries with weak investor protection. This finding is consistent with our hypothesis that market participants demand (and analysts supply) cash flow information when weak investor protection results in earnings that are...

We examine 3-day cumulative abnormal returns (CARs) around the announcement of 850 newly appointed outside board members assigned to audit committees during 1993-2002, a period prior to the implementation of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX). Motivated by the SOX requirement that public companies...

We test the assertion that a consequence of voluntarily adopting International Accounting Standards (IAS) is the enhanced ability to attract foreign capital. Using a unique database that reports firm-level holdings of over 25,000 mutual funds from around the world, our multivariate tests find...