Purpose: Managers of defined-benefit (DB) firms have considerable discretion in deriving pension costs and flexibility in cash contributions to pension plans. Pension accruals occur when cash contributions differ from pension costs. The manipulable nature of pension costs and cash contributions...

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to investigate whether financial analyst coverage affects the dissemination of disclosed operating lease information into cash flow predictions and stock prices. Design/methodology/approach: The difference in lease expense between capital/finance lease and...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to examine whether the choice of accounting treatment of transition obligation under SFAS 106 affects the value of firms, and also whether the quality of earnings is improved after the implementation of SFAS 106. Design/methodology/approach – Different...

This study applies an option pricing model to empirically derive pension put values for a sample of 176 individual pension plan sponsors insured by the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation (PBGC). This study finds that the pension put values for a group of 22 underfunded sponsors were...

We examine (1) whether there is a shift in beta for "individual" securities around quarterly earnings announcements, and (2) whether these beta changes relate to certain characteristics of the firms. We find a statistically significant upward (downward) beta shift during the two-day earnings...