Purpose: This paper aims to examine whether International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) adoption and corporate governance attributes increase the management earnings forecasts’ accuracy disclosed in prospectuses for French Initial Public Offerings (IPOs). Design/methodology/approach: The analysis is based on cross-sectional regression explaining the absolute forecast errors by using 45 French firms that made IPOs between 2005 and 2016 in two French financial markets: Euronext and Alternext. Findings: In agreement with the agency theory and the signaling theory, the authors find that the IFRS adoption and the effective corporate governance, proxied by the board characteristics, increase the accuracy of management forecasts. As a result, this latter gives a credible signal in constructing and sustaining shareholders’ trust on the transparency and the reliability of such financial information. Research limitations/implications: It is plausible that the limited size of the sample represents a limitation of this study. Another limitation is that no other corporate governance attributes such as board meeting frequency, audit committee measures and ownership structure are used. Practical implications: Shareholders can take benefit from management forecasts accuracy to structure their investment portfolios efficiently to allocate their funds more effectively and mitigate the costs of adverse selection that they have to face. Furthermore, the authors expect the findings to be interesting to IPO firms, as this study highlights the efficiency of larger and independent boards in decreasing managerial discretion, increasing disclosure quality and supervising management. The results could encourage GAAP-adopters countries to move toward IFRS, as this research reinforces the role of IFRS in enhancing the quality of financial disclosure by offering the required information for shareholders. Originality/value: This study is important because the potential investors should assess management earnings forecasts accuracy before they consider it when evaluating IPO firms. Also, this paper has some implications for the financial market. It is recommended that future investors pay more attention, when assessing the accuracy of management earnings forecasts, to the accounting regulations of the financial reporting along with the corporate governance mechanisms. Moreover, this study could incite French regulators to revise the AFEP-MEDEF code. Under this code, it could insist that larger and independent boards are more effective in performing their governing roles than smaller boards.

This paper aims to examine the volatility spillover, diversification benefits, and hedge ratios between U.S. stock markets and different financial variables and commodities during the pre-COVID-19 and COVID-19 crisis, using daily data and multivariate GARCH models. Our results indicate that the risk spillover has reached the highest level during the COVID-19 period, compared to the pre-COVID period, which means that the COVID-19 pandemic enforced the risk spillover between U.S. stock markets and the remains assets. We confirm the economic benefit of diversification in both tranquil and crisis periods (e.g., a negative dynamic conditional correlation between the VIX and SP500). Moreover, the hedging analysis exhibits that the Dow Jones Islamic has the highest hedging effectiveness either before or during the recent COVID19 crisis, offering better resistance to uncertainty caused by unpredictable turmoil such as the COVID19 outbreak. Our finding may have some implications for portfolio managers and investors to reduce their exposure to the risk in their portfolio construction.