The proportion of short-selling attacks including target prices has more than doubled from 2010 to 2018. In 637 attacks with target prices, short sellers claim that the attacked firms’ stock prices should drop by 65% on average, but the mean (median) decline is only 7% (16%) one year after the...

Under IFRS, managers can use two approaches to increase the estimated fair value of goodwill in order to justify not recognizing impairment: (1) make overly optimistic valuation assumptions, and (2) increase future cash flow forecasts by inflating current cash flows. Because enforcement...

We investigate the association between disclosures about key value drivers (i.e., growth, synergies, human capital, brands, customers and technology) in press releases announcing mergers and acquisitions (M&A) deals and acquirer stock returns upon the announcement. We find that, after...

We investigate how activist short sellers (AShSs) expose publicly listed firms in an increasingly popular form of “research reports” openly denouncing alleged frauds, flawed business models, accounting irregularities, and wrongdoings. We focus on six AShSs that issued research reports that...

Activist short sellers (AShSs) and financial analysts are information intermediaries who analyze firm disclosures as well as produce and disseminate influential investment narratives. This study aims to better understand narrative challenges surrounding the legitimate expertise of financial...

In this essay, we discuss the factors influencing the likelihood of convergence in corporate sustainability reporting. We identify several factors that negatively influence the probability of convergence in the short term. The first factor is the heterogeneity of concepts and definitions...

We study the effect of the mandatory adoption of IFRS in Europe in 2005 on conditional conservatism. To capture conditional conservatism, we use three measures: the Basu (1997) measure, the Khan and Watts (2009) measure, and a measure controlling for potential shifts in unconditional...

Financial valuation methods use additive aggregation operators. But a patrimony should be regarded as an organized set, and additivity makes it impossible for these aggregation operators to formalize such phenomena as synergy or mutual inhibition between the patrimony’s components. This paper...