Using a novel hand-collected dataset of business combination disclosures, we investigate whether and how fair-value adjustments (FVAs) arising from mergers and acquisitions facilitate debt financing. FVAs are the difference between the fair value and the book value of the target's net assets. We...

Accruals are fundamental to financial reporting and are the underlying innovation of accounting. Despite this, accounting research has provided little understanding of how economic forces affect a firm's level of accruals and limited guidance for forming expectations of accruals based on ex ante...

While the shareholder benefits of audits are well documented, evidence on whether audits can facilitate opportunistic behavior by corporate insiders is scarce. In this paper, we examine whether the audit process facilitates one particular form of opportunism: informed trading by corporate...

Prior to investing in a firm, fund managers must evaluate it. This tilts funds’ future portfolio positions toward former portfolio investments, as the past awareness of the firm decreases the cost of evaluating it in the future. We find that firms with many former investors experience...