Many central banks and government agencies use nowcasting techniques to obtain policy relevant information about the business cycle. Existing nowcasting methods, however, have two critical shortcomings for this purpose. First, in contrast to machine-learning models, they do not provide much if...

The Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) and the International Accounting Standards Board (IASB) are currently working together towards a comprehensive standard of accounting for financial instruments with characteristics of equity, liability, or both. An important facet of this project...

Firms have substantial freedom of choice about whether to disclose essential financial statement line items (e.g., total assets) for their business segments. Counting the number of line items that a firm discloses for its segments presents both a simple measure and a new angle for capturing the...

Purpose - We examine whether the social capital of the area where a firm's headquarters is located affects that firm's credit rating. Given that credit rating agencies only infrequently visit a firm's headquarters, it is pertinent to investigate whether this soft information is considered....

Studies suggest that when a language requires grammatical marking of future events, speakers prefer immediate payoffs and engage in less future-oriented behavior. If future costs of tax avoidance are non-trivial, we posit that strong future time reference (FTR) in languages would lower...