Until October 2004 corporate insiders in Germany were required to report trades in the shares of their firm "without delay". In practice substantial reporting delays were common. We show that the delays are systematically related to the characteristics of the firm. Delays are longer in...

Private firms often rely on insider lending, e.g. by banks. Insider lending is based on lending relationships that typically involve intertemporal loan pricing: losses from early years are recovered by information rents in later years, stemming from private information the inside lender has...

The mandatory adoption of IFRS by many countries worldwide fuels the expectation that financial accounting information might become more comparable across countries. This expectation is opposed to an alternative view that stresses the importance of incentives in shaping accounting information....