This study examines the effect of the Jumpstart Our Business Startups Act (JOBS Act) on information uncertainty in IPO firms. The JOBS Act creates a new category of issuer, the Emerging Growth Company (EGC), and exempts EGCs from several disclosures required for non-EGCs. Our findings are...

Whether fair value accounting should be used in financial reporting has been the subject of debate for many years. A key dimension to this debate is whether fair value earnings can provide information to financial statement users that is helpful in making their economic decisions. A criticism of...

This commentary reviews the status of the global use of International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS), including in the US, and offers thoughts on prospects for global financial reporting. Many countries require or permit the use of IFRS, but the goal of truly global, high quality financial...

Financial accounting is essential to financial accountability, which is essential to a prosperous society. There are many examples of how improvements to financial accounting, supported by research, have enhanced financial accountability. Such research requires a strong relation between...

This Closer Look illustrates the relation between executive compensation and organizational risk through the context of the financial crisis of 2008. We demonstrate that the incentives that bankers had to increase firm risk not only increased but increased substantially in the years preceding...

On December 5th and 6th 2014, the Stanford Graduate School of Business hosted the Causality in the Social Sciences Conference. The conference brought together several distinguished speakers from philosophy, economics, finance, accounting and marketing with the bold mission of debating scientific...

We address how value relevance of accounting information evolved as the new economy developed. Prior research concludes accounting information—primarily earnings—has lost relevance. We consider more accounting amounts and find no decline in combined value relevance from 1962 to 2014. We...

We investigate whether firms manage stock prices in anticipation of share issuance. Warrant exercise results in share issuance and warrant expiration dates are fixed years in advance, which precludes market timing. We predict firms manage stock prices to prevent (induce) warrant exercise when...

We investigate whether mandatory earnings announcement date forecasts are informative to investors and the informational tradeoffs between mandatory and voluntary forecasts. We find: (i) The percentages of the quarter's earnings news conveyed by mandatory China and voluntary US forecasts are...