A commonly cited motivation for off-balance sheet financing is a reduction in reported book (balance sheet) leverage. Operating leases, the most common form of off-balance sheet financing, are required to be disclosed in financial statement footnotes, but limited disclosure complicates external...

A substantial and increasing proportion of corporate assets consists of intangible assets. Despite their growing importance, internally-generated intangible assets, the dominant type, are largely absent from balance sheets and other corporate reports. Consequently, the empirical capital...

We document that borrowing costs and credit ratings are less sensitive to off-balance sheet lease financing than to on-balance sheet debt financing, particularly for firms that are financially constrained and firms that have limited ability to use tax shields. This evidence is consistent with...

Prior studies have provided a number of possible explanations for delayed market reactions to earnings announcements. However, there has been relatively little effort to predict the magnitude of the post-earnings announcement drift (PEAD). We show that the squared correlation coefficient (p2 )...

We contribute to the current debate on the accounting treatment of operating leases by providing evidence from bond markets and private lending on the market recognition of the role of leasing in determining borrowing costs and credit ratings. Borrowing costs and credit ratings are less...

This paper examines the effect of tax-related material weakness in internal controls on investors' valuation of unrecognized tax benefits (UTBs). Firms are required to record a UTB when their uncertain tax positions are unlikely to be sustained upon tax return audit. While Koester (2012) finds...

Using customer level data, prior marketing research has developed a micro or bottom up approach to link marketing activities with shareholder value. This study develops a macro or top down approach using longitudinal firm level data from publicly available financial statements. Test results show...

Casual observations suggest that bidder managers sometimes pay more than the economic value of target in mergers and acquisitions. This paper provides two empirical findings associated with overpayments in acquisitions among publicly traded U.S. firms during the period of 2003-2011 using the...

This paper reports three empirical findings on the differential information content of components of accounting profitability. First, the paper finds that shareholder profitability driven by operating activities has a stronger association with annual stock returns than shareholder profitability...

This paper presents a model that relates properties of the analysts' information environment to the properties of their forecasts. First, we express forecast dispersion and error in the mean forecast in terms of analyst uncertainty and consensus (that is, the degree to which analysts share a...