Defined benefit pension plans can entail one of the biggest liabilities that an exchange-listed company has on its balance-sheet. There exist comprehensive requirements for the reporting of such liabilities. This paper examines the impact that defined benefit pension plans had on the financial...

This paper evaluates three possible explanations for why empirical studies have found a quite moderate response of multinationals' capital structure to tax incentives. Firstly, by concentrating on debt decisions by operating subsidiaries, previous studies may have overlooked the importance of...

We consider a setting in which insiders have information about income that outside shareholders do not, but property rights ensure that outside shareholders can enforce a fair payout. To avoid intervention, insiders report income consistent with outsiders' expectations based on publicly...

At the end of April 2010, the International Accounting Standards Board (IASB) published an exposure draft with proposed changes to International Accounting Standard No. 19 (IAS 19). IAS 19 is the current standard for the financial reporting of company pension obligations that stem from defined...

Cash settlements became a popular design feature in convertible securities once they obtained favorable accounting treatment for diluted earnings per share in 2002. The unexpected proliferation of cash settlements provoked the FASB to eliminate their favorable accounting treatment in 2008. We...

I examine the impact of state-contingent allocation of creditor control rights on financial reporting. Using a discontinuity analysis, I find that firms' financial reporting becomes more conservative immediately after covenant violations and this effect persists for at least eight quarters. The...

This study examines the causal link between a firm's leverage decisions and the characteristics of its CEO bonus plans. Results from a simultaneous equations model strongly suggest that highly levered firms are less likely to use return on equity (ROE) or ROE-based accounting performance...

We examine the relation between corporate governance and firms' information environments. We use the passage of state antitakeover laws in the U.S. as a source of exogenous variation in an important governance mechanism to identify changes in firms' information environments. We find that...