We examine the effect of auditor litigation risk on firm capital structure decisions by exploiting staggered state-level shocks to third-party auditor legal liability in the United States. We find that an exogenous increase in auditor litigation risk leads to an increase in firm leverage ratios...

A classic problem in public finance is the over-expenditure of local governments in expectation of a bailout from higher-level administrations. While monitoring could mitigate agency problems, it can itself be rendered ineffective if auditors are corruptible. I evaluate whether limiting...

We investigate the effect of auditor litigation risk on firm-level investment. Exploiting the staggered increase in third-party auditor legal liability in US states as an exogenous shock, we find that increased risk of auditor litigation leads to an increase in corporate investments. This effect...

We examine the effect of auditor conservatism on corporate innovation. We hypothesize that because conservative auditors constrain income-increasing accounting discretion, managers may sacrifice long-term investments in innovation to boost current earnings and meet short-term performance...

I argue that external financial reporting quality has at best a 2nd order effect on firm value of U.S. publicly traded companies and that attempts to improve a firm's external reporting quality has a 3rd order effect on these firms' value. Recognizing that external financial reporting quality is...

Recent accounting research examines the impact of the individual style of corporate decision-makers on corporate accounting policies. Based on this line of research, we explore how a chief financial officer's (CFO) preference for accounting conservatism affects accounting quality. We provide...

By the end of the 20th century, the competitive structure of the public accounting industry evolved into a tight oligopoly. We predict a reversal of this trend, because new issuers of public equity, who steadily replace legacy companies in the set of public companies, display less verifiable...

This paper analyzes the impact of agents' risk aversion and other agency parameters on optimal bias in the performance measures used for incentive contracts. Prior research has shown that the limited liability of the agent results in a demand for accounting systems that are stringent compared to...