Government regulation of financial reporting by publicly listed firms, coupled with a punitive regime for violation of Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP) has been in place in the United States for seven decades. Whether this regime is effective or useful is an open question,...

We consider legal rules that determine the price at which minority shareholders can be excluded from the corporate enterprise after a change in control. These rules affect investment after such a change as well as the probability of the change itself. Our principal results are that minority...

We have seen a revival in interest in corporate law and corporate governance since the 1980s, as researchers applied the tools of the new institutional economics and modern corporate finance to analyze the new transactions emerging in the 1980s takeover wave. This article focuses on three...

Parties to lending agreements can create priority rankings in two ways: by securing a lender or by protecting the lender's debt with financial covenants. Protected debt turns into high priority debt because the early lender will permit covenant violations only if a later lender agrees to...

Section 365 of the Bankruptcy Code prohibits enforcement of the once common "ipso facto" clause." The clause excuses the solvent party from performance of the contract when the other party becomes insolvent. We show that the ability of insolvent firms to continue bad projects is enhanced by the...

Prior research has estimated piece-meal the determinants of audit fees, non-audit fees and abnormal accruals. Intuition, informal analysis, and a variety of theories suggest that audit fees, non-audit fees, and abnormal accruals are jointly determined. We address this endogeneity issue by...

Prior research has estimated piecemeal the determinants of audit fees, non-audit services fees and abnormal accruals. Intuition, informal analysis, and a variety of theories of various aspects of auditor-client interaction suggest that audit fees, nonaudit fees, and abnormal accruals are jointly...

Design of contracts that define firms, and their accounting systems depends on the conditions in the firm's factor and product markets. We examine the fundamental difficulty of defining and developing "uniform" accounting for diverse economic environments across countries and compare the...

In the face of uncertainty, firms often place a premium on flexibility. By keeping their options open, firms are able to adjust decisions as uncertainty is resolved. Valuing this benefit of flexible projects is the focus of the real options approach to capital budgeting. This paper presents an...

Growth of online auctions and other forms of e-commerce has been hampered by concerns about the privacy, integrity, and security of online transactions. To earn the trust of their participants, new e-commerce organizations, like traditional organizations, have to reach the state of expectations...