This paper examines the relationship between the board structure of UK firms and the accuracy of individual analysts’ earnings forecasts with respect to information asymmetry and agency theory. We hypothesize that managers of firms complying with the recommendations of The Code of Best Practice may have “less to hide” and, subsequently, provide more information to outsiders (including analysts)...

This paper reports new finding on earnings response coefficients of banking firms on how information disclosed regarding (i) total earnings and (ii) fee earnings is associated with share price changes around the time of financial report releases. This paper extends to banking firms a widely used analysis of earnings response studies on non-banking firms. To obtain robust test results, we extend...

Prior studies consistently report higher explanatory power (R) for firm-specific returns-earnings models than for pooled models. The improvement in R by adding firm-specific coefficients to returns-earnings regressions is cited as evidence that price responses to earnings news vary with certain firm-specific characteristics. We argue that relying on R as a criterion to evaluate competing return...

The 'watch dog' role of the media, the impact of migration processes, health care access for children in developing countries, mitigation of the effects of Global Warming are typical examples of governance issues – issues to be tackled at the base; issues to be solved by creating and implementing effective policy. to pave the road for innovative policy developments in Europe and the world today...

This paper examines the relation between annual report readability and firm performance and earnings persistence. I measure the readability of public company annual reports using the Fog index from the computational linguistics literature and the length of the document. I find that: (1) the annual reports of firms with lower earnings are harder to read (i.e., they have a higher Fog index and ar...

We examine the stock price reaction to announcements that firms are alleged to be doing fraudulent financial reporting or manipulating earnings, using a sample of firms cited by the Securities Exchange Commission (SEC) in its Accounting and Auditing Enforcement Releases (AAERs) during the time period 1985-2005. We find a total 14% drop in stock price over a three day window surrounding the anno...

We propose a framework to estimate earnings distributions and worker and firm unobserved heterogeneity on matched panel data. We introduce two models: a static model that allows for interaction effects between workers and firms, and a dynamic model that allows in addition for Markovian dynamics in earnings and mobility decisions. We establish identification in short panels. We develop a tractab...