We find that the average credit and liquidity risks of U.S. banks, the two principal determinants of bank distress, increased significantly over the last forty years or so. This trend stemmed from progressively aggressive business strategies adopted by new banking cohorts as well as old...

Regulators have alleged that digital giants (Alphabet, Facebook, Microsoft, Apple, and Amazon) have misused their market power to earn abnormal profits. Research that systematically documents whether technology firms earn abnormal profits is limited, arguably because (i) U.S. GAAP based...

Based on the current U.S. GAAP, internally developed intangibles are not included in reported assets. Omission of an increasingly important class of assets reduces the usefulness and relevance of financial statement analysis, conducted using book value. Recent studies attempt to overcome this...

In this note, we provide a brief description of the internal rate of return (IRR) data, as constructed in Rajgopal, Srivastava, and Zhao (The Accounting Review, 2023). We describe how to access our IRR data for publicly traded companies on a firm-year-specific basis, to be used by academics,...

We use the setting of a new Texas law to investigate the economic substance behind the current, heightened political debate around environmental, social, and governance (ESG) issues. In September 2021, the Texas legislature directed its state agencies to divest from investment companies that...

Revenue is the closest proxy in financial statements for market size and dominance, factors that often determine the survival and future profits of modern corporations. Hence, revenue may contain information relevant to investors’ decision making, in addition to the information contained in...