This paper examines the effects of audit firm mergers and the demise of Andersens on market concentration, competitiveness and audit pricing in the UK. Our results indicate that the large audit firms increased their market share between 1985 and 2002 by merging and expanding into new sectors....

We show that book-to-market, size, and momentum capture cross-sectional variation in exposures to a broad set of macroeconomic factors identified in the prior literature as potentially important for pricing equities. The factors considered include innovations in economic growth expectations,...

We combine the innovative approaches of Elliott, Komunjer, and Timmermann (2005) and Patton and Timmermann (2007) with a block bootstrap to analyze whether asymmetric loss functions can rationalize the S&P 500 return expectations of individual forecasters from the Livingston Surveys. Although...

This paper investigates the information environment during and after a corporate break-up utilizing direct measures of information asymmetry developed in the market microstructure literature. The analysis is based on all corporate break-ups in the United States in the period 1995-2005. The...

While theoretical models strongly suggest that short-sales are mainly driven by private information, recent empirical evidence of has been rather mixed. This paper contributes to the discussion by looking at various potential motives to sell short and compares these with regular buys and sales...

We analyze commonality in informed trading across stocks, and how informed trading varies with the structural and trading characteristics of a firm. We thereby isolate the residual level of informed trading that is unrelated to commonality, trading characteristics, and structural...

We combine the innovative approaches of Elliott, Komunjer, and Timmermann (2005) and Patton and Timmermann (2007) with a block bootstrap to analyze whether asymmetric loss functions can rationalize the S&P 500 return expectations of individual forecasters from the Livingston Surveys. Although...

We show that book-to-market, size, and momentum capture cross-sectional variation in exposures to a broad set of macroeconomic factors identified in the prior literature as potentially important for pricing equities. The factors considered include innovations in economic growth expectations,...

Our study attempts to determine whether, and if so why, the large auditing firms are able to earn a premium on their audit work in the UK. We start by confirming the apparent existence of a Big Firm premium during the period 1985-2002. We examine industry specialisation, non audit service fee...