Krispy Kreme Doughnuts, Inc. used a 2000 initial public offering (IPO) to embark on an active expansion and franchise reacquisition program. This case focuses on this high-visibility franchise reacquisition program and several associated and highly controversial accounting issues, and provides...

When private firms are acquired, buyers commonly rely on seller financing and earnouts. Using a novel database of private acquisitions, I find that seller financing and earnouts become more common as information asymmetry increases between the acquirer and the target. Financial statement audits...

The Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) is currently evaluating proposed changes to the manner in which insurance companies account for, and currently capitalise, the costs of selling and initiating insurance contracts. Our study examines the potential effects of these proposed changes...

Very often business acquisition is associated with the introduction of new products, new markets and increase in the market share of the investee probably as a result of the increase in the economies of scale. This is usually anticipated in view of the intense due diligence exercise which...

This paper investigates the value relevance of acquired intangible assets using a comprehensive hand-collected dataset for 1,647 publicly listed US-firms from 2002 to 2018. This dataset allows us to disentangle acquired intangible assets into different classes (e.g., tech-, customer-, contract-,...

We test whether firms that exclude the effects of amortization from their non-GAAP earnings allocate more of an acquisition’s purchase price to definite-lived intangible assets (DLIA). This strategy can yield two potential benefits: it can (1) increase non-GAAP earnings by shifting...

Business sectors around the globe have recently seen rapid changes in the corporate world due to the ongoing pandemic. To financially and economically survive and strengthen their current footprints, businesses have merged and acquired other companies nationally and internationally. This article...

The recent influx of foreign companies to the U.S. capital markets via reverse mergers, transactions that bypass the scrutiny given to IPOs, has raised concerns about the quality of financial reporting by the resulting firms. Using an array of proxies for reporting quality, we find that the...

Prior research documents improvements in pre-acquisition outcomes when acquirer and target firms engage the same audit firm to perform their financial statement audits before the acquisition. In contrast to prior studies, we examine whether the advantages of engaging a common auditor prior to an...