"Spending on M&A has, in aggregate, grown so fast that it has even overtaken capital expenditure on increasing and maintaining physical assets. Yet McKinsey, the leading management consultancy, reports that "Anyone who has researched merger success rates knows that roughly 70% fail". The idea...

This paper attempts to tease out some of the reasons why the history of M&A accounting has been so fraught. It compares the different M&A accounting regimes which have been tried over time in UK, US and international standards. It illustrates the quantitative impact of alternative accounting...

Concerns have been raised in the academic and practitioner literatures of accounting that, in general, standard-setters have increasingly neglected stewardship and reliability in pursuit of value-relevance; and then, in particular, that current accounting for the vast sums now expended on...

This study investigates whether and how voluntary disclosure affects the earnings announcement premium (EAP). Using S&P500 index additions as an exogenous source of variation to voluntary disclosures, we test the effect of guidance on information risk and investor attention as drivers of the...

We construct a novel data set to show that, between 2003-2020, up to one-fifth of America’s largest firms had a non-financial blockholder or insider as their largest shareholder. Blockholders and insiders tend to be less diversified than institutional investors. Measures of “universal” and...

We construct a novel data set to show that, between 2003-2020, up to one-fifth of America's largest firms had a non-financial blockholder or insider as their largest shareholder. Blockholders and insiders tend to be less diversified than institutional investors. Measures of "universal" and...