We explore the differential market reaction to the unambiguous bad news and good news signals provided by the going-concern audit opinion and its withdrawal for 845 firms from 1994 to 2002. Results show asymmetric market response to these news events. The market underreacts to such bad news...

We test the predictions of the three main behavioral finance theories of market under- and overreaction using out-of-sample data conditional on the nature of the news using the going-concern audit opinion (bad news event) and its withdrawal (good news event). We find strong support for the...

We investigate the stock price reaction to UK going-concern audit report disclosures in the calendar year subsequent to publication. Over this period our firm population underperforms by between 24% and 31% depending on the benchmark adopted. This market underreaction to such an unambiguous bad...

This paper investigates why the market fails to incorporate the adverse information conveyed by the going-concern (GC) opinion in a timely manner. Our main conjecture is that the lottery-like features of GC stocks attract a predominantly retail clientele who use those stocks to gamble in the...

We investigate whether gambling-motivated retail trading generates mispricing among firms with extreme negative news. Employing a novel accounting-based measure of failure propensity conveyed by the going-concern (GC) audit opinions, we show that gambling-induced trading in GC firms with...

Prior studies suggest that VCs play a monitoring role. We predict and find that IPO-year abnormal accruals are lower in the presence of VCs for a sample of 2630 IPO firms during 1983-2001. Our findings are robust to controls for the endogenous choice of VC financing. We consistently find that...

This paper examines the interaction of a little-studied stakeholder - the venture capitalist (VC) - with the audit function in the initial public offering (IPO) market. While the monitoring role of the external auditor has been studied in the IPO accounting literature, a relatively recent stream...