We revisit the asymmetric timeliness of earnings as proposed by Basu (1997). For a large sample of US firm years from 1970-2019, we show that earnings are asymmetrically timely with respect to bad economic news, and that this is robust to the declining timeliness of good news, different time...

Prior research finds that clients of high-quality auditors report higher quality GAAP earnings. We extend this research to investigate whether auditor quality is associated with the quality of voluntarily disclosed non-GAAP earnings measures. Using a sample of Australian firms disclosing annual...

Social trust helps to reduce information asymmetry and agency conflicts between insiders and investors, and thus alleviates the pressure on firms to pay cash dividends. Consistent with this view, we find that Chinese firms in low-trust regions make higher dividend payouts than those in...

We argue that the broader applicability of accounting research is often limited by the way accounting researchers typically place far greater weight on the relative cost of type I versus type II errors. To illustrate the extent of this problem, we examine the performance of simple financial...

“Say on pay” legislation has been introduced in several countries but Australia's version, namely the “two-strikes” rule, is unique in that it empowers shareholders to vote on a board spill if the compensation report of a public company receives 25% or more dissenting votes for two...

Fund managers tilt towards stocks from the location of their tertiary education (education province). We find that, compared with their peers, fund managers overweight stocks headquartered in their education provinces by 20.56%. This overweighting differs from the effects of local bias, hometown...

This study investigates the effect of financial technology (FinTech) development on stock price crash risk. We show that the development of FinTech can inhibit management from deliberately hiding bad news and alleviate information asymmetry, thereby reducing stock price crash risk. This effect...

We investigate the extent to which international and domestic economic policy uncertainty (EPU) impacts analysts’ earnings forecasts for Australian Securities Exchange (ASX) listed firms. Over a twenty-year period, we demonstrate that EPU is positively associated with analyst coverage, the...