Environmental, social and governance ("ESG") scores have been widely touted as indicators of share price resilience during the COVID-19 crisis. Contrary to this conventional wisdom, we present robust evidence that once industry affiliation, market-based measures of risk and accounting-based measures of performance, financial position and intangibles investments have been controlled for, ESG offers no such positive explanatory power for returns during the COVID crisis. Specifically, ESG is insignificant in fully specified returns regressions for each of the Q1 2020 COVID market crisis period and for the full COVID year of 2020.By contrast, a measure of the firm's stock of investments in internally generated intangible assets is an economically and statistically significant positive determinant of returns during each of the Q1 market implosion and full 2020 COVID year periods. Our results are robust to alternative measures of returns, as well as for using Refinitiv, Refinitiv II and MSCI data to capture ESG performance. We conclude that ESG did not immunize stocks during the COVID-19 crisis, but those investments in intangible assets did.

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Mandatory IFRS Reporting and Stock Price InformativenessBeuselinck, C.A.C.; Joos, P.P.M.; Khurana, I.K.; van der Meulen, S. Publication date: 2010 Link to publication Citation for published version (APA):Beuselinck, C. A. C., Joos, P. P. M., Khurana, I. K., & van der Meulen, S. (2010). Mandatory IFRS Reporting and Stock Price Informativeness. (CentER Discussion Paper; Vol. 2010-82). Tilburg: Accounting. General rightsCopyright and moral rights for the publications made accessible in the public portal are retained by the authors and/or other copyright owners and it is a condition of accessing publications that users recognise and abide by the legal requirements associated with these rights.-Users may download and print one copy of any publication from the public portal for the purpose of private study or research -You may not further distribute the material or use it for any profit-making activity or commercial gain -You may freely distribute the URL identifying the publication in the public portal Take down policyIf you believe that this document breaches copyright, please contact us providing details, and we will remove access to the work immediately and investigate your claim. Mandatory IFRS Reporting and Stock Price InformativenessAbstract: In this paper, we examine whether mandatory adoption of IFRS influences the flow of firm-specific information and contributes to stock price informativeness as measured by stock return synchronicity. Using a constant sample of 1,904 mandatory IFRS adopters in 14 EU countries for the period 2003-2007, we find a V-shaped pattern in synchronicity around IFRS adoption, which is consistent with IFRS disclosures revealing new firm-specific information in the adoption period (i.e., a reduction of synchronicity) and subsequently lowering the surprise of future disclosures (i.e., an increase in synchronicity). We also find mandatory IFRS adoption increases analysts' ability to incorporate industry-level information into stock price. However, we are unable to detect a reduction in the private information advantage enjoyed by institutional owners post-IFRS adoption. Moreover, we find the synchronicity effects to be more pronounced for firms in countries with larger differences in local GAAP relative to IFRS. Overall, our evidence yields novel insights on the consequences of mandatory IFRS adoption by investigating its effect on stock price informativeness and the distinctive roles played by a firm's information environment.

We explore the factors associated with historical IPO failures by developing an IPO failure prediction model that includes accounting information as well as proxies for the role of information intermediaries and other IPO deal-related characteristics. We document statistically significant differences in failure models applicable to nontech versus high tech IPOs, and these structural differences are largely driven by accounting-based proxies for firms' investments in intangible assets, operating performance, and financial leverage. We also develop parsimonious, predominantly accounting-based, strictly outof-sample (i.e., no hindsight) IPO failure forecasting models for each of the two sectors. We find that our forecasts are negatively associated with one-year post-IPO abnormal returns. A pseudo-hedge strategy of going short (long) in high (low) failure risk portfolios yields returns of economically significant magnitudes over the one-year horizon, and is robust to alternative returns methodologies. Further results suggest that IPO long-run returns anomalies may persist, but they take different forms for high-tech and nontech IPOs. * INSEAD; †Tilburg University. We thank

This paper examines the stock market reaction to 15 events relating to IFRS adoption in the United States. The goal is to assess whether investors perceive the switch to IFRS as beneficial or costly. Our findings suggest that investors' reaction to IFRS adoption is more positive in cases where IFRS is expected to lead to convergence benefits. Our results also indicate a less positive market reaction for firms with higher litigation risk, which is consistent with investors' concerns about greater discretion and less implementation guidance under IFRS for these firms. Overall, the findings are relevant to the current debate on IFRS adoption in the U.S. and highlight the importance of convergence to investors. Data Availability:  All data are publicly available from the sources indicated in the paper (see Appendices A and B).

Prior research shows that accounting information is relevant for stock valuation, failure prediction, performance evaluation, optimal contracting, and other decision-making contexts in relatively stable market settings. By contrast, accounting's role during stock market bubbles such as those involving a revolutionary emerging technology is the subject of considerable debate, and prominent market observers have alleged that outdated and flawed accounting practices contributed to the crash of the Internet-led high-tech bubble of the late 1990s. We address the issue of whether accounting data is informative in a stock market bubble by examining its failure prediction ability in the context of Internet IPOs, one of the most egregious and economically significant sectors of the high tech bubble. Our setting of young start-up firms is one in which there is relatively little room for managerial discretion with respect to accounting accruals; Internet firms' accounting earnings closely approximate operating cash flows. Yet in contrast to widespread criticisms of accounting and its alleged role in fueling the bubble, we find that accounting variables are highly informative for failure prediction; specifically, they are significant in explaining ex post realized Internet IPO failures. Using an existing IPO failure prediction methodology and two alternative definitions of innovative IPOs, we further show that ex ante, out-of-sample Internet IPO failure forecasts are associated with economically and statistically significant hedge returns. Our analyses suggest that the traditional financial reporting system could serve as an anchor during speculative bubbles.

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