This case is a comparative analysis of the strategy, accounting, performance, and valuation for two restaurant chains alternatively having a company-owned versus franchising strategy. It requires students to identify these two different strategies, and the related impact on the financial...

Learning Objective:(1) introduces students to financial statements for banks and basic regulatory capital ratios (2) allows students to assess the impact of potential future write-offs/fair value decreases arising from the continuing financial crisis, and how Citigroup can respond

This paper examines how the reporting model for a firm's operating assets affects analyst forecast accuracy. We contrast UK and US investment property firms having real estate as their primary operating asset, exploiting that UK (US) firms report these assets at fair value (historical cost). We...

This paper investigates the effect of fair value reporting and its attributes on audit fees. We use as our primary sample the European real estate industry around mandatory IFRS adoption (under which reporting of property fair values becomes compulsory), due to its unique operating and reporting...

This paper investigates alternative models of learning to explain changes in uncertainty surrounding earnings innovations. As a proxy for investor uncertainty, we use model-free implied volatilities; as a proxy for earnings innovations, representing signals of firm performance likely to drive...

This paper investigates whether managers' presentation of special items within the financial statements reflects economic performance or opportunism. Specifically, we assess special items presented as a separate line item on the income statement (income statement presentation) to those...

Finance theory proposes that firms' cost of capital increases when market makers set wider spreads due to perceived higher information asymmetry across traders. Using a sample of UK investment property firms and controlling for firms' non-random selection of external monitors, we find evidence...

This paper predicts and finds that investor uncertainty surrounding a key information release event—the earnings announcement—is decreasing in a firm's reporting streak. We use three proxies related to investor ex ante uncertainty and corresponding pricing of such uncertainty: option-implied...

Recent accounting research employs an asymmetric timeliness measure to test the hypothesis that reported accounting earnings are conservative. This research design regresses earnings on stock returns to examine whether bad news is incorporated into earnings on a more timely basis than good news....

Prior research reveals that write-offs of long-lived assets are both large in magnitude and frequent in occurrence. Responding to calls for enhanced reporting of these items, the FASB issued SFAS 121, Accounting for the Impairment of Long-Lived Assets. However, its effect on the characteristics...