We examine the extent to which analysts who participate in earnings conference calls by asking questions possess superior private information relative to analysts who do not ask questions. Using a large sample of earnings conference call transcripts over the period 2002 to 2005, we find that...

The announcement by the Reserve Primary Fund, in September 2008, that it was “breaking the buck,” triggered a widespread withdrawal of assets from other money market funds and led the U.S. Government to adopt emergency measures to maintain the stability of the short term credit markets. In...

Islamic Finance has been growing at annual double-digit rates for about 40 years although even in conservative Islamic countries the Sharia with its prohibition of interest (ribâ) is not directly applicable law. Islamic Finance is voluntary and encompasses all kinds of financial services that...

There are few things more constant in life than the rise and fall of financial markets. When markets crash, however, we are forced to restore them while learning from our mistakes. In the wake of the recent subprime mortgage crisis, Congress has drastically but deservedly overhauled the...

The European Commission's Proposal for a Regulation on European Crowdfunding Service Providers (ECSPs) for businesses, since its presentation, has faced difficult trilateral negotiations among the European Commission, the European Parliament and the Council of the European Union. The length of...

Financial reporting around the time of IPOs is consistent with listed firms reporting more conservatively than previously as private firms, consistent with the results in Ball and Shivakumar (2005). We hypothesize that IPO firms supply the higher quality financial reports demanded by public...

We examine whether conflicts of interest with investment banking and brokerage induce sell-side analysts to issue optimistic stock recommendations and, if so, whether investors are misled by such biases. Using quantitative measures of potential conflicts constructed from revenue breakdowns of...

This article is the Belgian report concerning rating agencies to the 2006 Congress of the International Academy of Comparative Law to be held in Utrecht. After describing credit rating practices in Belgium, the report considers the extent to which Belgian regulation requires, or relies upon,...

This article seeks to contribute to the discussion concerning the adequacy of the legal responses to conflicts of interest in institutional asset management. After defining the legal concept of a conflict of interest in general, the insights of economic theory, especially agency theory, are...

Prior to Regulation Fair Disclosure (Reg FD) some management spent considerable time and effort guiding analyst earnings estimates, often through detailed reviews of analysts' earnings models. In this paper I use proprietary survey data from the National Investor Relations Institute to identify...