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Despite the allegations of audit failure and the enormous publicity surrounding Arthur Andersen's indictment, there is no systematic empirical evidence on characteristics of accounting information of clients of Arthur Andersen vis‐à‐vis other Big 6 auditors. I examine whether earnings of Andersen's Houston‐based clients are timely in reporting bad news about future cash flows. I find that relative to a control group consisting of Houston‐based clients audited by other Big 6 auditors, earnings of Andersen clients are less timely in reporting bad news. Further, it appears that operating accruals of Andersen clients are less effective in accelerating the timely recognition of bad news than operating accruals of non‐Andersen clients. The findings suggest that the clients of Andersen's Houston office engaged in aggressive accounting practices, including delayed recognition of publicly available bad news.

Despite the allegations of audit failure and the enormous publicity surrounding Arthur Andersen's indictment, there is no systematic empirical evidence on characteristics of accounting information of clients of Arthur Andersen vis-à-vis other Big 6 auditors. I examine whether earnings of Andersen's Houston-based clients are timely in reporting bad news about future cash flows. I find that relative to a control group consisting of Houston-based clients audited by other Big 6 auditors, earnings of Andersen clients are less timely in reporting bad news. Further, it appears that operating accruals of Andersen clients are less effective in accelerating the timely recognition of bad news than operating accruals of non-Andersen clients. The findings suggest that the clients of Andersen's Houston office engaged in aggressive accounting practices, including delayed recognition of publicly available bad news.

This study uses the introduction of second-generation antitakeover legislation as a natural experimental setting to infer the value that managers place on the control rights conferred by stock ownership. We conjecture that managers will reduce their stockholdings in the post-legislation period because they can ensure their prior level of control while holding fewer risky shares. Using a variety of specifications, we find robust evidence consistent with this "revealed preference" hypothesis. Further demonstrating the key role played by control considerations in managers' stockholding decisions, the reductions in ownership are concentrated in management teams with higher levels of initial ownership and in firms without poison pills.

This paper proposes a new framework for understanding financial intermediation. In contrast to previous research, we consider a setting in which intermediaries possess no inherent information processing or monitoring advantages. Instead, in an economy with overly optimistic entrepreneurs who require funding from pessimistic investors, we show that intermediaries can arise endogenously. In such a setting, only a rational intermediary will be sufficiently optimistic to find it worthwhile to invest in a technology for screening entrepreneurs' projects, and yet be pessimistic enough to use this technology. Our framework produces implications consistent with heretofore unexplained stylized facts, and conjectures which are thus far untested.

This paper studies The Netherlands' private sector self-regulation initiative (“The Peters Committee”) to improve corporate governance practices. We examine the relation between firm value and corporate governance characteristics before and after the private sector initiative. We find the initiative had no effect on corporate governance characteristics or their relationship with firm value. Event study results suggest the market was skeptical about the success of self-regulation of corporate governance practices in The Netherlands. Our results on The Netherlands self-regulation initiative suggest little should be expected from initiatives that rely on monitoring without enforcement (e.g., similar or weaker initiatives in other European Union (EU) countries).

The positive market reaction associated with an ADR listing is frequently attributed to a reduction in market segmentation costs that improves access to capital. If so, the benefit should be greatest for ADR firms that face relatively high indirect barriers to capital access. Our paper directly tests this supposition. We document that, following a U.S. listing, the sensitivity of investment to free cash flow decreases significantly for firms from emerging capital markets, but does not change for developed market firms. Further, emerging market ADR firms mention the need for access to external capital markets in their filing documents more frequently than their developed market counterparts and, in the post-ADR period, tout their liquidity rather than a need for capital access. Finally, the increase in capital access following an ADR is more pronounced for firms from emerging markets. Our findings suggest that greater access to external capital markets is an important benefit of a U.S. stock market listing for emerging market firms and is less important for developed market firms.

This paper solves explicitly a simple equilibrium model with liquidity risk. In our liquidity-adjusted capital asset pricing model, a security's required return depends on its expected liquidity as well as on the covariances of its own return and liquidity with the market return and liquidity. In addition, a persistent negative shock to a security's liquidity results in low contemporaneous returns and high predicted future returns. The model provides a unified framework for understanding the various channels through which liquidity risk may affect asset prices. Our empirical results shed light on the total and relative economic significance of these channels and provide evidence of flight to liquidity.