We develop an analytical framework that divides the contribution of pension risk to the total systematic risk of the firm into two parts: (1) the risk due to the investment strategy of the pension plan (“Mismatch Risk”); and (2) the risk due to the funded status of the pension plan...

We examine the causal effect of expected private litigation costs on voluntary disclosure using a natural experiment, the Supreme Court ruling in Morrison v. National Australia Bank. This ruling reduced expected private litigation costs for foreign cross-listed firms by eliminating the right of...

The finances of many states, cities, and other localities are in dire straits. In this Article, we argue that partial responsibility for this situation lies with the outdated and ineffective financial reporting regime for public entities. Ineffective reporting has obscured and continues to...

I develop approaches that quantify the use of discretion for the three main assumptions used for the financial reporting of defined benefit pension obligations: the expected return, the discount rate, and the compensation rate. I then apply these approaches to two regulatory events that affected...

We demonstrate the value of machine learning in accounting through a detailed examination of litigation risk, an important and frequently used estimate in the literature. We evaluate a comprehensive set of twelve machine learning techniques and benchmark their performance against the logistic...

We examine how investors respond to concurrent financial and ESG performance news and the implications of their response for investor screening. Our analyses reveal that investors respond more strongly to ESG performance news during earnings announcement (EA) periods than non-EA periods. We also...