This paper examines the impact of the accounting flexibility offered by IFRS 1 during the 2005 mandatory adoption of IFRS in the European Union. Same year reconciliations between local GAAP and IFRS are used on a sample of 1,635 European firms to determine the nature and extent of their use in...

We present new evidence on the violation of priority of claims in bankruptcy and recovery rates for secured creditors, unsecured creditors, equity holders using a sample of firms that filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy between 1993 and 2004. Our study reveals a number of new insights: First, we...

The current methodology to evaluate default and bankruptcy prediction models is to determine their precision - the percentage of firms predicted correctly. In this study we develop a framework for incorporating Type I (the amount lost from lending to a firm which goes bankrupt) and Type II (the...

This paper analyzes a sample of 1,722 European firms during their mandatory transition from local country accounting rules (Local GAAP) to International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) in 2004 and 2005 using the same set of firm-year observations. We use this unique transition period to...

The venerable case of Hadley v. Baxendale serves as the prototype for default rules designed to penalize, and thus encourage disclosure by, an undesirable contractual counterpart. Penalty-default analysis is now widely accepted as a plausible approach to the issues presented by incomplete...

The priority structure of debt claims against business entities is a key feature of corporate finance. The American Bankruptcy Institute's Commission to Study Reform of Chapter 11 recently recommended that U.S. bankruptcy law grant junior, out-of-the-money creditors a distribution in the...

While it is generally maintained that earnings management can occur to inform as well as to mislead, evidence that earnings management informs has been scarce, and evidence that credibility increases with signal costliness inexistent. We provide evidence that firms use discretion over financial...

While increases in earnings are common, we identify a setting in which they signal a separating equilibrium. Firms that “defy gravity' (DG) by reporting increases in earnings despite experiencing a decline in sales from continuing operations, signal their viability as a going- concern, and...

The observed smoothing of earnings (i.e. negative contemporaneous correlation between accruals and cash flows) is the joint product of the role of accruals in smoothing out transitory fluctuations in operating cash flows (noise reduction role) and the role of accruals in providing timely gain...

We examine whether a firm's decision to disclose non-financial proprietary information depends on peer disclosures of similar information. Using a sample of 5,035 unique clinical trials by U.S. pharmaceutical firms over the 2007-2014 period, we find that the firm is less likely to disclose its...