This paper discusses the rise of carried interest in investment partnerships and its controversial tax treatment; it looks into the history of private equity as well as recent literature in determining whether its current treatment is justified, and moreover, suggests further considerations with regards to the matter.

Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Oklahoma, 1995. / Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (M. Sc.)--University of Hong Kong, 2002. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 74-79).

Initial public offerings (IPOs) are primarily valued using the comparable firms approach, whereby underwriters rely heavily on multiples based on the accounting information of peer firms. Effective use of the comparable firms approach depends significantly on the underwriter's ability to estimate the expected future growth and profitability of the IPO firm and its peers and make appropriate adjustments to the multiples to arrive at a final offer price for the IPO shares. I find evidence that, in general, IPO valuations are decreasing relative to peers in the similarity of the peer group to the IPO firm, but this effect is moderated by the peer group's accruals quality. These findings suggest that when peers are similar to the IPO firm, underwriters make less adjustments to the final offer price, however, higher peer accruals quality may ease the assessment of differences in growth and profitability, facilitating further adjustments.

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Accounting information is an integral part of the information set used by investors. However, accrual based accounting earnings are susceptible to earnings management. Investors are concerned about earnings management since earnings management can distort reported earnings and they may make decisions that they otherwise would not have made. The purpose of this thesis is to examine the impact of earnings management on the informativeness of reported earnings about firm value and analysts' forecasts. Chapter 2 develops an earnings management model and examines the impact of earnings management on income smoothing and the earnings response coefficient. Chapter 3 critically reviews the existing discretionary accrual models and discusses the measurements of earnings management and income smoothing, which are used in the subsequent empirical chapters. Chapter 4 empirically examines the impact of earnings management on the earnings response coefficient after controlling either for the smoothness of pre-managed earnings or for the smoothness of reported earnings. Firms are further decomposed into income smoothing and variance-increasing earnings management firms and the same analyses are repeated. Chapter 5 examines the impact of smoothness of reported earnings and earnings management on the equilibrium demand for analysts' services and the properties of analysts' forecasts. This thesis contributes to our understanding of the impact of earnings management on firm value and analysts' forecasts by providing empirical evidence consistent with the hypothesis that the financial market and analysts are aware of the nature of a firm's discretionary accrual policy, and use their beliefs about the firm's discretionary accrual policy in assessing firm value and deciding whether to follow the firm.

This study examines the incremental information of Canadian accounting principles when financial information according to US GAAP is known. The impact of SEC-required reconciliations of net income and voluntary disclosures of shareholders' equity reconciliations on share returns and prices are analysed. Based on such analysis, inferences are made about the incremental informativeness of Canadian GAAP. This study follows the concurrent study by Richardson et al. that examines the question of incremental informativeness of Canadian GAAP given the benchmark information provided by US GAAP. This study offers three contributions to this literature. First, it examines the components of reconciliation data and assesses their impact on share returns and prices. Second, it analyzes the effect of exchange rate flucuations on the relationship between reconciliation data and share returns. Third, it analyzes the impact of the dominant trading market on the relationship between reconciliation data and share returns. Unlike Richardson et al., the results of this study suggest that Canadian GAAP offers very limited incremental information when US GAAP financial information is known for Canadian firms that crosslist on the Toronto Stock Exchange and on a US exchange. Convergence of Canadian and US GAAP during the 1993-94 sample period used in this study may partially explain why its results are differenct from the 1983-93 sample period used by Richardson et al. Some components of the reconciliation data were statisticly significant in explaining crosslisted firms' returns (prices). However, exchange rate flucuations, location of dominant market and reporting currenies were not statistically significant in explaining crosslisted firms' returns (prices).

No description available.

No description available.