This paper seeks to investigate the level of ethical awareness, as well as the attitude towards creative accounting, among accounting and non-accounting students of the post-Enron generation. Creative accounting is in essence not illegal and investors may sometimes even benefit from its...

This paper examines the quality of financial statements reported by private equity (PE) backed companies in the years around the initial PE investment. We study both pre- and postinvestment earnings characteristics of a unique hand-collected sample of 556 Belgian unlisted companies, receiving PE...

effective tax rate (ETR) and face a less positive association between pre-tax income and ETRs than independent firms. These findings suggest that individual group members apply efficient tax planning techniques in order to minimize taxes at the group level. We hypothesize that group firms...

We investigate whether a firm’s disclosure policy is affected by the changing corporate setting and intensified corporate governance associated with private equity (PE) investments. For a unique sample of unquoted PE backed firms we observe a significant switch to increased financial...