A recent paper published in The Accounting Review caught my attention. The paper is entitled, “The effect of annual report readability on analyst following and the properties of their earnings forecasts,” and is written by University of Michigan researchers Reuven Lehavy, Feng Li, and Kenneth Merkley. Readability is measured using the Fog index, which is [...] Read more > >
Test post. Read more > >
In a paper just posted on SSRN, Cornell PhD student Young-Jun Cho and I assess the performance of a stock market called SLCapex. From the abstract: SLCapex is a stock exchange owned and operated by “residents” of the online virtual world Second Life. Despite its almost complete lack of regulation and legal protections against fraud [...] Read more > >
In a paper just posted on SSRN, Cornell PhD student Young-Jun Cho and I assess the performance of a stock market called SLCapex. From the abstract: SLCapex is a stock exchange owned and operated by “residents” of the online virtual world Second Life. Despite its almost complete lack of regulation and legal protections against fraud [...] Read more > >
If someone had asked me this question, my quick response would have been 19. (Well, it might have been something more nuanced like, “I think around 18 or so.”) But a recent post by Tom Selling on the Accounting Onion points out how in many of the IFRIC’s decisions not to provide an interpretation (i.e., [...] Read more > >
Over the course of the past few months, I’ve reviewed a number of books and papers that were nominated for the 2010 AAA Wildman Medal Award, which seeks to recognize papers that use rigorous research methods to deal with current issues in accounting practice. One of the nominated papers was entitled, “Consequences of GAAP disclosure [...] Read more > >
Join us Tuesday, March 9 at 4pm when Scott Dyreng of Duke University discusses his recent research on the cost of violating covenants on private debt. The key message of the paper is that firms are willing to pay extra taxes in order to avoid debt covenant violations. The study uses a somewhat unfamiliar data [...] Read more > >
If HRC’s actual results fell short of expectations, Scrushy would tell HRC’s management to “fix it” by recording false earnings on HRC’s accounting records to make up the shortfall. – SEC vs. HealthSouth Corporation[HRC] You look back and think, ‘What was I thinking? Why didn’t I just do the right thing?’ But when you’re caught [...] Read more > >
If HRC’s actual results fell short of expectations, Scrushy would tell HRC’s management to “fix it” by recording false earnings on HRC’s accounting records to make up the shortfall. – SEC vs. HealthSouth Corporation[HRC] You look back and think, ‘What was I thinking? Why didn’t I just do the right thing?’ But when you’re caught [...] Read more > >
I just read the introduction of a paper that compares commercial and academic risk measures (Price, Sharp, and Wood 2010). And the winner is (drum roll….) commercial risk measures in almost every test. Here’s the abstract: Although a substantial body of academic research is devoted to developing and testing risk proxies that detect or predict [...] Read more > >