The winner-takes-all business model followed by many U.S. Internet firms predicts that spending on intangibles will exhibit increasing profitability returns-to-scale. That is, larger expenditures should be more profitable per dollar of investment than small expenditures because larger...

The SEC decided in 2007 to allow foreign private issuers who use IFRS as promulgated by the IASB (pure IFRS filers, hereafter) to stop providing reconciliations to US GAAP. Some opposed the measure because the limited academic literature available at the time indicated that the reconciliation is...

In the past six years, the average number of industries (2-digit SIC) serviced by audit offices in the United States has grown by 20% and the number of industries where the office has specialization has fallen by 40% (Data Source: Audit Analytics). This suggests a trend away from specialization...

The rise of stock indexing has raised concerns that index investing impedes arbitrage and degrades price discovery. This paper uses Russell’s reconstitution to identify the causal effect of index investing on information arbitrage and price discovery. While index investing has no discernible...

A popular interpretation of the Rational Expectations/Efficient Markets hypothesis states that, if it holds, market valuations must follow a random walk; hence, the hypothesis is frequently criticized on the basis of empirical evidence against such a prediction. Yet this reasoning incurs what we...

A popular interpretation of the Rational Expectations/Efficient Markets hypothesis states that, if the hypothesis holds, then market valuations must follow a random walk. This postulate has frequently been criticized on the basis of empirical evidence. Yet the assertion itself incurs what we...

In light of the current debate about the link between accounting and financial stability, we investigate the determinants of procyclical book leverage for US commercial and savings banks. We find that total asset growth and GDP growth are both positively related to book leverage growth. Our...

In light of the current debate about the link between accounting and financial stability, we investigate the determinants of procyclical book leverage for U.S. commercial and savings banks. We find that total asset growth and GDP growth are both positively related to book leverage growth. Our...

This paper investigates whether U.S. regulatory actions around reverse mergers have exerted any spillover effects on the Chinese firms listed in China and whether Chinese firms have exhibited lower financial reporting quality than their U.S. counterparts. To test the possible spillover effect,...

We examine whether customer-base concentration has a differential impact on profitability for firms contracting with major government customers versus firms contracting with major corporate customers. We document that firm profitability increases with the concentration of major government...