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....

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...

Our analytical description of how banks’ responses to asset price changes can result in procyclical leverage reveals that for banks with a binding regulatory leverage constraint, absent differences in regulatory risk weights across assets, leverage is not procyclical. For banks without a...

Our analytical description of how banks’ responses to asset price changes can result in procyclical leverage reveals that for banks with a binding regulatory leverage constraint, absent differences in regulatory risk weights across assets, leverage is not procyclical. For banks without a...

This paper analyzes whether fair value estimates of fund net asset values (NAVs) produced by private equity managers are accurate and unbiased predictors of future discounted cash flows (DCF). We exploit the fact that private equity funds have finite lives to compare reported NAVs to DCFs based...