On February 3-4, 2016 SUERF – The European Money and Finance Forum –, Deutsche Bundesbank and Stiftung Geld und Währung jointly organized a Colloquium/Conference in Frankfurt in order to evaluate the experience with the SSM – the Single Supervisory Mechanism – during the first year of...

Although the role of auditing is to increase the reliability of financial statements, surprisingly little is known about addressees’ perceptions of the auditor-client relationship. Using a sample of more than 1,000 U.S. bank-years from 2008 to 2011, we analyze the economic consequences of the...

On 3 December EY hosted a SUERF conference on banking reform with Sir Howard Davies, the Chairman of RBS, and Dame Colette Bowe, the Chairman of the Banking Standards Board, as the two keynote speakers. Professor David Miles (Imperial College) gave the SUERF 2015 Annual Lecture on Capital and...

We empirically explore the link between Level 3 fair value estimates and banks' default risk as well as default costs. Both variables are especially important to banks' creditors and the regulatory authorities that rely on the information in financial statements. In a fixed-effects panel model,...

We use Benford's Law to provide evidence that German firms round up both their net income and earnings per share. We use the introduction of the euro to show that round earnings numbers are likely the result of earnings management. The incentive to round up comes from stakeholders’ left-digit...

While the accounting literature implies that increased discretionary accruals follow auditor changes, the underlying causal mechanism of this increase remains unclear. The potential reasons are the loss of the auditor's firm-specific knowledge or the firm's opportunistic choice of a new auditor....