Firms placed on negative credit watch face the threat of a credit rating downgrade. At the same time, they are given the opportunity to put recovery efforts in place to retain their current credit rating. In this paper, we test to what extent firms use earnings management as a short-term...

The rank list model is a general non-parametric choice model that provides an intuitive and flexible framework to capture rational consumers' preferences. The rank list model assumes that each customer has a fixed and consistent preference ranking over all products and chooses the product that...

In this paper, we analyze whether the voluntary purchase of audit reviews lowers firms' cost of debt. An audit review is a tool through which boards assess interim financial reports' quality on a timely basis throughout the year. The voluntary purchase of an audit review is therefore likely to...

Within a sample of firms undergoing financial distress, where the incentive to send false positive signals is high, we show that insider trading serves as a credible information channel about potential recovery for outside investors. We employ credit rating downgrades as confirmation of the...