We document that firms' management of accounting earnings increased steadily from 1987 until the passage of the Sarbanes Oxley Act (SOX), with a significant increase during the period prior to SOX, followed by a significant decline after passage of SOX. However, the increase in earnings...

The paper presents a statistical method for measuring the level of informed trading in the UK ahead of regulatory announcements (takeover announcements and trading updates). The measure is based on the use of event studies to identify significant abnormal stock returns ahead of regulatory...

Participants in the forty-year debate over whether insider trading should be liberalized have generally treated insider sales the same as insider purchases - they have argued that all such insider transactions should be either regulated or liberalized. This article contends that there is a...

We empirically investigate the effects of the adoption of Regulation Fair Disclosure (Reg FD) by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission in October 2000. This rule was intended to stop the practice of selective disclosure, in which companies give material information only to a few analysts...

Despite the longstanding insider trading debate, there is little empirical research on insider trading laws, especially in a comparative context. The article attempts to fill that gap. I find that countries with more prohibitive insider trading laws have more diffuse equity ownership, more...

An increasing focus on improved disclosures has been the regulatory thrust of securities regulations since the great crash of 1929. India gave up the merit based system of a controller regulating the issue of securities in favor of the disclosure based regulatory philosophy in 1988. Since then...

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 contribute to the literature on Regulation Fair Disclosure (FD) in three ways. First, we provide evidence on whether FD has achieved its intended effect of leveling the information playing field by examining whether differences across investors' information quality prior to earnings...

Underpricing of initial public offerings (IPOs) is a well-known phenomenon in financial capital markets worldwide. Even if several explanations and theories deal with the difference of the issue price of new shares and their first trading price in the secondary market, the underpricing-puzzle is...