We predict and find that regulations expected to harmonize and strengthen firms' financial reporting in the European Union (EU) in the early 2000s increase Tobin's Q ratios of firms with high agency costs due to (a) concentration of control (entrenchment) and (b) an excess of the largest...

In their current framework project, the IASB and the FASB identify decision usefulness as the objective of financial reporting. Unfortunately, accounting research has neither yet come up with an undisputed measure of decision usefulness, nor with a satisfying method to rank competing measurement...

In their joint framework project, the FASB and the IASB recently proposed dropping stewardship as one of the objectives of financial accounting, because the Boards view stewardship and valuation usefulness as compatible sub-objectives ranking under an overall objective of decision usefulness....

Financial scholars who research the initial underpricing and long-term underperformance of IPOs generally attribute these phenomena to information asymmetry and investors' misevaluations. Here, we identify, on a sample of 2,696 US IPOs issued during 1980-1995, a widespread source of information...

We provide a theory of mandatory accounting conservatism as a means to avoid speculative bubbles and overvaluation. In a simple exchange economy where agents trade due to differences in opinion, we show that conservatism leads to a lower expected stock price than a full disclosure regime. Thus...

I investigate the relationship between contemporaneous stock price performance and the persistence of accrued earnings, and its impact on the accrual anomaly. I find that in a fiscal year, accrued earnings for stocks that have performed poorly are less persistent in predicting future earnings...

We investigate the effects of the introduction of Statement of Financial Accounting Standards No. 131 (SFAS 131) on the market's valuation of foreign earnings. Thomas (1999) documents that investors discount the value of foreign earnings for U.S. multinational companies. He conjectures but does...

This paper investigates the market and accounting based valuation effects of troubled debt restructurings (TDR) in financially distressed debtor firms. I first rely on extant valuation theories to predict the impact of a TDR on shareholders' wealth. Next, some empirical evidence on the...

We investigate two explanations for the declining contemporaneous linear relation between annual stock returns and accounting earnings over the past 30 years: (1) earnings increasingly reflect news with a lag relative to stock prices and (2) earnings increasingly reflect good and bad news in an...