A substantial literature investigates conditional conservatism, defined as asymmetric accounting recognition of economic shocks (ldquo;newsrdquo;), and how it depends on various market, political and institutional variables. Studies typically assume the Basu (1997) asymmetric timeliness...

A principal-components analysis demonstrates that common earnings factors explain a substantial portion of firm-level earnings variation, implying earnings shocks have substantial systematic components and are not almost fully diversifiable as prior literature has concluded. Furthermore, the...

Financial reporting around the time of IPOs is consistent with listed firms reporting more conservatively than previously as private firms, consistent with the results in Ball and Shivakumar (2005). We hypothesize that IPO firms supply the higher quality financial reports demanded by public...

The East Asian countries of Hong Kong, Malaysia, Singapore and Thailand provide a rare opportunity to study the interaction between the accounting standards under which financial statements are prepared and the incentives of managers and auditors who prepare them. Their accounting standards are...

We quantify the relative importance of earnings announcements in providing new information to the share market, using the r-squared in a regression of securities' calendar year returns on their four quarterly earnings announcement window returns. The r-squared, which averages approximately five...

Financial reporting around the time of IPOs is consistent with listed firms reporting more conservatively than previously as private firms, consistent with the results in Ball and Shivakumar (2005). We hypothesize that IPO firms supply the higher quality financial reports demanded by public...

The East Asian countries of Hong Kong, Malaysia, Singapore and Thailand provide a rare opportunity to study the interaction between the accounting standards under which financial statements are prepared and the incentives of managers and auditors who prepare them. Their accounting standards are...

Bonus issues, share splits and rights issues are studied in a replication and extension of the classic Fama, Fisher, Jensen and Roll study. On the Melbourne exchange, each category on average is associated with positive abnormal returns. However, the market does not appear to value bonuses or...

The two-moment, mean-variance model of asset pricing is tested against data from the Melbourne stock exchange. The model appears to describe the data quite well, though there are problems in experimental design which are yet to be cleared up. Neither variance nor skewness appears to explain...

In the spirit of Fisher and Lorie (1968), the authors constructed a data base comprising monthly rates of return on 1029 separately-listed Sydney mining equities over the period January 1958 to February 1979. The data base should stimulate further research. The first use of the data is a study...