The amount of newly created information increases every year. Large-scale automation projects, the ubiquity of personal computers and the declining prices of storage are all factors that contribute to this trend. The huge amount of information has made it impossible for human analysts to gain a...

In this text, Prof. Willekens reports on the reflections proffered by the chair (John Hegarty) and two of the guest speakers (Stan Beckers and Eric De Keuleneer) at the occasion of the second seminar, 2000- 2001, of the PwC Chair Value and Risk. The seminar tools place on February 22, 2001, and...

In een omgeving met weinig rechtsvervolgingen, zoals België, blijkt het verslag van de commissaris tot 3 jaar vóór falen een adequaat signaal te zijn voor het voorspellen van de kans op faillissement. De commissaris gebruikt de aard van het verslag als signaal. Eerst drukt zij haar...

Earnings are an extensively used summary statistic of a firm’s financial performance. Various corporate reporting scandals (such as Enron and Lernout & Hauspie) have raised concerns regarding the credibility of this performance measure. This paper first discusses the empirical evidence on...

In information and data quality management, we need good tools and architectures. But, in order to achieve real productivity and quality improvements, the technology is not enough. Most of all we need the good attitude to deal with information. This paper introduces the concept of ‘information...

In this paper we give the outline of a research project developed in a cooperation between the actuarial, financial and statistical research groups of the Faculty of Economics and Applied Economics and the research group on statistics in the Mathematical Department. The main purpose consists...

Recent studies have documented that auditor industry specialization is associated with higher audit fees for public firms in Australia, the U.S. and the U.K. This paper uses a unique dataset that consists of all audit engagements for the year 2004 to examine this issue in Belgium. We document...

Data mining involves extracting interesting patterns from data to create and enhance decision support systems. Whereas in the early days of data mining, some tasks already relied on statistical and operations research methods such as linear programming and forecasting, data mining methods...