We explore the differential market reaction to the unambiguous bad news and good news signals provided by the going-concern audit opinion and its withdrawal for 845 firms from 1994 to 2002. Results show asymmetric market response to these news events. The market underreacts to such bad news...

This paper investigates why the market fails to incorporate the adverse information conveyed by the going-concern (GC) opinion in a timely manner. Our main conjecture is that the lottery-like features of GC stocks attract a predominantly retail clientele who use those stocks to gamble in the...

We test the predictions of the three main behavioral finance theories of market under- and overreaction using out-of-sample data conditional on the nature of the news using the going-concern audit opinion (bad news event) and its withdrawal (good news event). We find strong support for the...

We investigate whether gambling-motivated retail trading generates mispricing among firms with extreme negative news. Employing a novel accounting-based measure of failure propensity conveyed by the going-concern (GC) audit opinions, we show that gambling-induced trading in GC firms with...

The purpose of this paper is to examine whether modified opinions issued for reasons of going-concern uncertainties ('going-concern opinion') mitigate the bankruptcy announcement surprise for firms that did not previously exhibit obvious public signs of financial trouble. Extant studies...

We examine whether short-term financial reporting objectives related to executive compensation and employment horizons affect managers' decisions to undertake accelerated share repurchases (ASRs) versus open market repurchases (OMRs). In an ASR, the firm repurchases borrowed shares and...

Prior studies suggest that VCs play a monitoring role. We predict and find that IPO-year abnormal accruals are lower in the presence of VCs for a sample of 2630 IPO firms during 1983-2001. Our findings are robust to controls for the endogenous choice of VC financing. We consistently find that...

We hypothesize that the choice to obtain a financial statement audit provides external financiers with incremental information about the firm, which helps reduce information asymmetry and financing frictions. Using a natural experiment, we show that when external financiers observe a firm's...

Using a sample of firms experiencing exogenous CEO departures, we investigate whether firms with overconfident CEOs avoid more tax. We find robust evidence of a positive relation between proxies for corporate tax avoidance and CEO overconfidence. Because our empirical tests use a panel of...