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ABSTRACTWe hypothesize that managers anticipate a disproportionately larger price increase associated with rounded earnings per share (EPS) and make additional effort to round EPS when they plan to sell shares after the earnings announcement. Consistent with this hypothesis, we find that managers who round diluted EPS have higher managerial insider sales following the earnings announcement compared to managers who do not. Furthermore, we find that the positive association between rounding of diluted EPS and subsequent stock sales undertaken by chief financial officers (CFOs) is stronger when the level of abnormal stock repurchases is higher, consistent with managers’ strategic behavior.

ABSTRACTUsing a novel debt enforcement index reflecting legal and economic characteristics directly relating to resolving insolvency across the world, we document that bank loan terms are more stringent (larger interest rate spread, higher collateral requirement, more covenants) in countries with weaker debt enforcement. The effect is more prominent when creditor rights are better protected and debtors are exposed to higher fundamental and informational risks. Improved enforcement has real effects of reducing borrowers’ covenant violation and enhancing their preference for bank funding. Lenders’ syndicates become more concentrated as loan contract enforceability deteriorates. A difference-in-differences analysis of insolvency resolution reforms worldwide confirms the cross-country evidence.

ABSTRACTWe investigate the effects of informal institutions on the relationship between accounting-based risk measures and bank distress. We conduct our analysis in two stages. In the first stage, we extend the prior literature by documenting a link between accounting-based risk measures and bank distress during the 2008–2009 financial crisis. In particular, given the environment characterized by rapid growth in financial innovation and complex financial transactions prior to the crisis, simple accounting-based risk measures continue to predict bank distress during this crisis period. In the second stage, we address our main research question related to the effects of selected informal institutions (societal trust, religiosity, and the media) in enhancing the predictive ability of accounting-based risk measures. As hypothesized, we find that these informal institutions enhance the predictive ability of accounting-based risk measures. Our results inform regulators that the focus on strengthening formal institutions should not ignore country-specific informal institutional structures.JEL Classifications:G21; G28; G34.Data Availability:Data are available from the sources cited in the text.

We examine the relationship between religiosity and risk-taking in the international banking sector. Previous research indicates that individuals who are more religious have greater risk aversion. Additionally, prior literature documents a positive relation between religiosity and both financial accounting transparency and timely recognition of bad news. Given timely recognition of future loan losses, religiosity could constrain excessive risk-taking through enhanced internal and external monitoring. We hypothesize and find that banks located in more religious countries exhibit lower levels of risk in their decision-making. We also demonstrate that banks in more religious countries were less likely to encounter financial difficulty or fail during the 2007–2009 financial crisis.

We investigate the association between large CEO pay and the underlying economic determinants of pay, governance variables, variables capturing director pay, and other potential variables that may explain large CEO payouts. We also examine whether firms with large CEO pay have better future performance and use more financial reporting discretion than other firms. Our study is motivated by the large payouts to CEOs over the last decade that continue to attract considerable attention from institutional investors, regulators and the popular press. Our results indicate that whether a firm has large CEO pay is only weakly related to the underlying economic determinants but strongly related to components of outside director remuneration, the dual role of CEO and board chair, asset change, whether the firm has a new CEO, and CEO equity ownership. Additionally, we find that large CEO pay firms engage in higher levels of financial reporting discretion and have weaker future performance.