In this paper we empirically evaluate the widespread belief of managers that income smoothing results into lower stock market risk. Multivariate regressions confirm that a negative relation exists between discretionary income smoothing and idiosyncratic volatility. Further analysis indicates...

Religion has been shown to influence economic choices and outcomes in a variety of contexts. Honesty and risk aversion are two social norms forwarded to characterize the religious. Using the level of religious adherence in the county of a U.S. firm's headquarters as a proxy for these religious...

One consequence of the shift to fair value measurement is the emergence of voluntary disclosures in audited financial statements that question the reliability of mandated fair value information. We refer to these disclosures as reliability disavowals and address three questions: Are fair value...

This study examines the private debt contracting relation between performance covenants and conservative accounting under asymmetric information. Asymmetric information is characterized by borrowers' proclivity to appropriate wealth from lenders to themselves. We find that accounting...

We examine the importance of professional relationships developed between analysts and managers by investigating analyst coverage decisions in the context of CEO and CFO moves between publicly listed firms. We find that top executive moves from an origin firm to a destination firm trigger...

We investigate the impact of founding family ownership on accounting conservatism. Family ownership is characterized by large, under-diversified equity stake and long investment horizon. These features give family owners both the incentives and the ability to implement conservative financial...

We construct an interlocking-directorship network and we use social network and graph theory to identify firms that have access to a wider diversity of information, early access to that information and more control over information diffusion. We examine whether, as predicted by the theory, these...

We examine the impact of global IFRS adoption on cross-border equity investments by individual investors. Our proxy for cross-border equity investments is trading volume in the Open Market at Frankfurt Stock Exchange. The Open Market is a segment designed for German individual investors to trade...

We posit that accounting conservatism could mitigate the value destruction associated with increases in cash holdings. Consistent with this conjecture, we find that the market value of an additional dollar in cash holdings increases in accounting conservatism. This result is robust to...

We evaluate accounting-based methods to estimate the implied cost of capital using a simulation approach. We simulate a model economy in which the true cost of capital is known and calibrate it to the CRSP-Compustat universe. We then compare the true cost of capital to the implied cost of...