Six years after the passage of the 2008 Troubled Asset Relief Program, commonly known as TARP, it remains hard to measure the total social costs and benefits of the assistance to banks provided under TARP programs. TARP was not a single approach to assisting weak banks but rather a variety of...

We examine the cost-effectiveness, from the shareholders' perspective, of the accounting standards issued by the FASB during 1973-2009. In particular, we evaluate (i) the stock market reactions of firms affected by the standards surrounding events that changed the probability of issuance of...

We investigate the role of mandatory financial disclosure in the takeover market for privately held U.S. banks. Public financial information plays a critical role in the takeover market as acquirers rely on it to identify potential targets and conduct preliminary due diligence. Using a...

To understand how practitioners operationalize evaluations of earnings quality, we obtain a proprietary dataset of 1,029 reports on aggressive reporting practices over 2003-2015 for 348 unique firms published by a research firm (RF) that sells such data to institutional clients. From these...

We examine the rhetoric in ESG literature that managers “share the pain” of employees who are laid off or whose benefits are cut by committing to reduce CEO pay or by enacting other positive worker friendly actions during the Covid crisis. Using the exogenous shock of the COVID pandemic and...