We investigate whether and how an exogenous and unprecedented improvement in non-U.S. firms' financial-reporting quality affects post-earnings-announcement drift (PEAD). We find that PEAD declines after the information shock, and this decrease is more pronounced for firms with fewer concurrent earnings announcements, greater institutional holdings, and lower limits to arbitrage. In addition, the decrease in PEAD is driven by firms with greater changes in financial reporting, an increase in analyst forecast accuracy and institutional ownership, and a decrease in limits to arbitrage. These findings support the mispricing explanation of PEAD, in particular the limited attention hypothesis, in an international setting.

This study examines the association between changes in reported financial performance resulting from mandatory adoption of International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) and equity issuance during the transition period leading up to IFRS adoption for listed firms in Australia and Europe. We hypothesize that firms affected by the accounting standards change strategically time equity issuance around the time the firm discloses the effects of IFRS adoption on reported financial performance. We document circumstances where market returns are associated with the reconciliation of net income between local GAAP and IFRS. We find that a firm's likelihood of equity issuance and equity issue size during the three years prior to the IFRS reconciliation disclosure are negatively associated with the unexpected change in net income resulting from the conversion to IFRS.

We examine how the market power of credit rating agencies (CRAs) affects their rating standards. Using a global sample across 26 countries from 1994 to 2019, we find that greater market power of global CRAs, measured by their country-level market shares, is associated with stricter corporate ratings. In addition, the increase in global CRAs' market shares contributes to the tightening trend in their credit ratings worldwide. Exploiting the NRSRO designation of local CRAs in Japan, we find that global CRAs issue more inflated ratings following a decline in their market power. Further, global CRAs' greater market power is associated with timelier ratings, fewer missed defaults, but more false warnings. Collectively, our findings suggest that global rating agencies' market power leads to stricter rating standards and timelier ratings by strengthening the agencies’ reputation concerns, but at the expense of increased false warnings.

This study investigates how accounting harmonization affects one particular group of financial statement users—financial analysts. We find that mandatory International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) adoption attracts foreign analysts, particularly those from countries that are simultaneously adopting IFRS along with the covered firm's country and those with prior IFRS experience. We also find that mandatory IFRS adoption improves foreign analysts’ forecast accuracy. The change in analyst following increases with the distance between prior local Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP) and IFRS and with the extent to which IFRS adoption eliminates GAAP differences between the firm's country and the analyst's country. IFRS adoption also attracts more local analysts, particularly those with prior IFRS experience and with an international portfolio prior to mandated IFRS adoption in their home country. Local analysts’ forecast accuracy is not affected by IFRS adoption. Overall, our results suggest that accounting harmonization brings comparability benefits that enhance the usefulness of accounting data.

We investigate whether and how an exogenous and unprecedented improvement in non-U.S. firms' financial-reporting quality affects post-earnings-announcement drift (PEAD). We find that PEAD declines after the information shock, and this decrease is more pronounced for firms with fewer concurrent earnings announcements, greater institutional holdings, and lower limits to arbitrage. In addition, the decrease in PEAD is driven by firms with greater changes in financial reporting, an increase in analyst forecast accuracy and institutional ownership, and a decrease in limits to arbitrage. These findings support the mispricing explanation of PEAD, in particular the limited attention hypothesis, in an international setting.

This study examines whether and when credit ratings are useful for accounting fraud prediction. We find that negative rating actions by Standard & Poor’s (S&P), an issuer-paid credit rating agency (CRA), have predictive ability for fraud incremental to fraud prediction models (e.g., F-score) and other market participants. In contrast, rating actions by Egan-Jones Rating Company (EJR), an investor-paid CRA relying on public information, have less predictive ability, which is subsumed by S&P and other market participants. Our results are robust to including firms not covered by EJR, using only rating downgrades, controlling for firm characteristics, and using alternative benchmarks. We also find that the ability of negative S&P rating actions to predict fraud becomes stronger after the 2008–2009 financial crisis. Last, compared with EJR, S&P is quicker to take negative rating actions against fraud firms. In sum, our results suggest that issuer-paid CRAs’ information advantage helps predict accounting fraud. Data Availability: Data are available from the public sources cited in the text.

Firms with higher R&D intensity subsequently experience higher stock returns in international stock markets, highlighting the role of intangible investments in international asset pricing. The R&D effect is stronger in countries where growth option risk is more likely priced, but is unrelated to country characteristics representing market sentiments and limits-of-arbitrage. Moreover, we find that R&D intensity is associated with higher future operating performance, return volatility, and default likelihood. Our evidence suggests that the cross sectional relation between R&D intensity and stock returns is more likely attributable to risk premium than to mispricing.