Although theory suggests that companies would rationally select into audit even if it were not a legal requirement, many countries impose mandatory audits. This is arguably due to an audit having elements of a public good, which may result in not enough audits being purchased without regulatory...

<heading id="h1" level="1" implicit="yes" format="display">ABSTRACT</heading>We explore the market response to announcements of first-time going-concern (GC) audit opinions and, for a subset of these cases, their subsequent withdrawal, from 1993 to 2005. We find that the market fully responds to GC withdrawal announcements but underreacts to the GC announcements...

With the European Commission making global leadership claims in the field of audit regulation, the content of its 2010 Green Paper on ‘Audit Policy: Lessons from the Crisis’ warrants careful scrutiny. Important issues raised in the Green Paper include regulatory oversight, competition in the...

After a long period of universal mandatory audit, the UK reduced the regulatory burden of private firms by introducing size-based audit exemption in 1994; the size thresholds have subsequently been progressively increased. Both accounting bodies and credit-rating agencies (CRAs) have expressed...

Recent studies suggest that certain growth-oriented fund managers have substantial skill but do not stipulate the particular skills that they possess. We examine in detail the style-timing abilities of growth-oriented equity mutual funds over the period from 1993 to 2006. We find that an...

Recently developed corporate bankruptcy prediction models adopt a contingent claims valuation approach. However, despite their theoretical appeal, tests of their performance compared with traditional simple accounting-ratio-based approaches are limited in the literature. We find the two...

Purpose – This paper aims to help explain the rapid growth in aggregate hedge fund assets under management until June 2008 followed by their subsequent dramatic collapse in terms of the conflicting emotions such investment vehicles evoke, and, from this, to consider the implications of the...

"This paper brings together the evidence on two asset pricing anomalies-continuation of prior returns (momentum) and the market mispricing of distressed firms-using UK data. Our analysis demonstrates both these effects are driven by market underreaction to financial distress risk. In particular,...