1,720,994 research outputs found
Does Shareholder Litigation Matter?
Get PDFThis study examines whether an unexpected shock to the risk of class-action lawsuits filed under securities laws affects the level of discretionary revenues, the market reaction to unexpected revenues, and the likelihood of restatements. I identify a court decision that reduced the risk of shareholder litigation for firms headquartered within a single jurisdiction. Subsequent to the decision, the likelihood of a restatement and the level of discretionary revenues increased while the market reaction to unexpected revenues declined for firms headquartered in this jurisdiction relative to firms headquartered in other jurisdictions. Further, these changes were driven primarily by firms that faced the highest risk of shareholder litigation. Overall, results indicate that the risk of shareholder litigation constrains managers from making opportunistic reporting choices. This study is relevant to the global policy debate about class-action litigation as a mechanism to regulate securities markets
The cost of private debt covenant violation
Get PDFThis study quantifies costs that firms are willing to incur to avoid violation of private debt covenants. The results indicate that as firms approach covenant violation they engage in income-increasing earnings management, which increases their tax liability. By estimating the extent of income-increasing activities and the additional tax costs incurred, this study arrives at a lower-bound estimate of the cost of violating private debt covenants. The mean (median) firm with relatively tight debt covenants increases its current tax liability by an amount equivalent to increasing the cost of debt financing by between 12.92 (10.72) and 22.72 (12.81) basis points (where firms with relatively loose debt covenants serve as the baseline). The magnitude of this estimate indicates that the expected costs of covenant violation are meaningful. Combined with recent evidence that private debt covenant violations occur frequently (Dichev and Skinner, 2002; Roberts and Sufi, 2007a), this implies debt covenants and expected violations are economically important
The effects of dividend taxation on short selling
Get PDFI examine the effects of dividend taxation on the primary parties involved in a short sale: the lender of the stock and the short seller. Using a proprietary dataset of short lending fees and quantities, I find evidence that the supply of shortable shares decreases and lending fees increase around the dividend record date. Moreover, I find greater increases in lending fees and decreases in loan supply for lenders that are sensitive to dividend taxation. The loan fee increase and loan supply decrease are consistent with a tax-induced shift in the loan supply curve. In addition, I examine effects on short sellers of the incomplete price drop on the ex-date. I find a significant decrease in short volume before the ex-date followed by a significant increase after the ex-date. This finding is consistent with short sellers delaying trading to avoid the cost of an incomplete price drop. To my knowledge, this is the first paper to examine the effects of dividend taxes in the domestic short selling market
Does Bank Opacity Enable Regulatory Forbearance?
Get PDFRegulators are charged with closing troubled banks, but can instead practice forbearance by allowing these troubled banks to continue operating. This paper examines whether bank opacity affects regulators' ability to practice forbearance. Opacity inhibits non-regulator outsiders from accurately assessing bank risk, potentially allowing regulators to forgo intervention. Employing a sample of U.S. commercial banks during the recent crisis, I find that bank opacity is positively associated with a new measure of forbearance and negatively associated with the probability of failing during the crisis. Cross-sectional results are consistent with opacity being more important for forbearance when (1) regulators' incentives are stronger (as measured by bank connectedness) and (2) outsiders' incentives to monitor are stronger (as measured by the proportion of deposits that are uninsured). These results suggest that opacity enables regulators to forbear on connected banks to prevent financial sector contagion and to disguise forbearance from uninsured creditors. This study contributes to the literature on the role of accounting in forbearance by being the first to show the effect of bank-level opacity on the regulator's decision to intervene or forbear.Doctor of Philosoph
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Get PDFThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
A Value Relevance Examination of the Current Leasing Standard
Get PDFIn the wake of the prominent accounting scandals of the past several years, investors and standard setters are demanding increased corporate transparency. Nowhere is the demand for transparency more salient than with off-balance-sheet financing, of which lease accounting plays a major role. At the end of 2004, total rental commitments by U.S. firms from off balance-sheet operating leases exceeded $1 trillion. As standard setters reconsider leases as part of their broad reexamination of off-balance-sheet financing, they do so without the benefit of empirical research documenting whether capital market participants find the current leasing standard value relevant. This paper examines whether as-if capitalized operating lease liabilities and capital lease liabilities are both relevant and sufficiently reliable to be priced and explores whether equity investors value operating and capital leases differently. The results are consistent with the market viewing both operating and capital leases as economic liabilities of the firm. However, the results also indicate that capital market participants price operating and capital lease liabilities differently, consistent with the bright-line tests of the current leasing standard identifying economic differences in operating and capital leases. Thus, continuing to require lease disclosures by different lease classifications would assure that equity investors will not suffer from a loss of value relevant information in the pricing of leases
Variations on the Author
Get PDF“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Get PDFWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Get PDFWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
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