This paper is concerned with the allegation that fair value accounting rules have contributed significantly to the recent financial crisis. It focuses on one particular channel for that contribution: the impact of fair value on actual or potential failure of banks. The paper compares four...

Though countries like the U.S.A., India and Nigeria have set their mottos based on high moral values like “In God We Trust,” “Truth Alone Wins,” “Unity & Faith: Peace & Progress,” it appears from experiences that today's governance (Man-Management) has been degraded to such an extent...

This paper empirically examines how debt covenants impact the capital structure choices of firms, by utilizing an exogenous accounting based shock to the distance to covenant violation. We find that, on average, the shock to debt capacity had a positive impact on the debt choices of all treated...

We are interested in understanding how agency conflicts in private firms arise through ownership structures and family relationships. Specifically, we analyze auditors' increase of effort and firms' choice of auditors in situations with higher level of agency conflicts. For a large sample of...

The European Union (EU) has been debating for several years whether to change from the legal capital regime as regulated under the Second Company Law Directive to a solvency test regime as applied in the US, for example. Based on an analysis of direct compliance costs and capital maintenance...

In this paper I investigate the relation between accounting based variables and bankruptcy risk, using information available for non-listed firms. I use a large sample of firms and find that many of the variables suggested earlier in the literature seem to provide little explanatory power....

We are interested in understanding how agency conflicts in private firms arise through ownership structures and family relationships. Specifically, we analyze auditors' increase of effort and firms' choice of auditors in situations with higher level of agency conflicts. For a large sample of...

It appears from experiences that today's governance (Man-Management) has been degraded to such an extent that moral bankruptcy has become an integral part of day to day business activities — as evidenced by recent experiences — where righteousness is at a discount (account tampering,...

This paper investigates the relationship between fair value accounting and the behavior adjustment of commercial banks which is aimed at catering to the regulatory requirements by using a dataset from Chinese listed commercial banks from 2007-2011.The empirical results show that (1) The...

Corporate off-balance sheet transactions that used special-purpose entities (“SPEs”) facilitated the expansion of structured finance during the years leading up to the Great Recession. Specifically, SPEs conferred bankruptcy remote, liquidity, leverage and interest rate risk benefits on...