CEO Profile and Earnings Quality

This paper introduces the PSCORE, which aggregates nine personal characteristics of chief executive officers (CEOs), to signal the quality of earnings. The PSCORE is a composite score based on publicly available data on CEOs. The study reports strong positive relationships between the PSCORE and two different proxies for earnings quality, (i) discretionary accruals and (ii) financial statement errors, measured by deviations of the first digits of figures reported in financial statements from those expected by Benford’s Law. Further analyses indicate that the relationships between the PSCORE and the proxies for earnings quality become more pronounced when CEOs have high equity-based compensation incentives. The findings have some implications for practitioners

A multi-criteria decision analysis for the assessment of the real estate credit risks

Following the approval of the Basel capital adequacy framework, the credit institutions had to adapt their skills to determine regulatory capital. In this regard, the methodologies defined by the Third Basel Accord [2] have some limits concerning the subjectivity of some aspects and the complexity of the valuation models, especially for the smaller credit institutions that lack suitable corporate structures capable of efficiently applying the established procedures. In order to overcome these issues, the Income Producing Real Estate Risk Index ($$I:{IPRE,risk}$$) is proposed in this work to provide a synthetic index of multi-criteria derivation as a useful reference in the decision-making processes relating to restructuring and debt relief operations

The role of audit verification in debt contracting: evidence from covenant violations

2016-2017 > Academic research: refereed > Publication in refereed journalbcrcAccepted ManuscriptSelf-fundedPublishe

A 3D self-organizing multicellular epidermis model of barrier formation and hydration with realistic cell morphology based on EPISIM

The epidermis and the stratum corneum (SC) as its outermost layer have evolved to protect the body from evaporative water loss to the environment. To morphologically represent the extremely flattened cells of the SC - and thereby the epidermal barrier - in a multicellular computational model, we developed a 3D biomechanical model (BM) based on ellipsoid cell shapes. We integrated the BM in the multicellular modelling and simulation platform EPISIM. We created a cell behavioural model (CBM) with EPISIM encompassing regulatory feedback loops between the epidermal barrier, water loss to the environment, and water and calcium flow within the tissue. This CBM allows a small number of stem cells to initiate self-organizing epidermal stratification, yielding the spontaneous emergence of water and calcium gradients comparable to experimental data. We find that the 3D in silico epidermis attains homeostasis most quickly at high ambient humidity, and once in homeostasis the epidermal barrier robustly buffers changes in humidity. Our model yields an in silico epidermis with a previously unattained realistic morphology, whose cell neighbour topology is validated with experimental data obtained from in vivo images. This work paves the way to computationally investigate how an impaired SC barrier precipitates disease