Ideally, firms should discontinue projects that become unprofitable. Managers, however, continue to operate such projects because of their limited employment horizons and empire-building motivations (Jensen, 1986; Ball, 2001). Prior studies suggest that timely loss recognition in accounting earnings...

Unlike previous studies that focus on accrual-based earnings management, this study analyzes real activities manipulation and investigates whether female directors on boards of directors (BoDs) affect managers’ real activities manipulation. Using a large sample of 11,831 firm-year observations...

This paper examines how independent directors' social capital, as measured by their social network, affects corporate fraud. We find that firms with well-connected independent directors are less likely to commit fraud, supporting our monitoring effect hypothesis. This result is robust to a...

This study takes advantage of the Forbes Rich List as an external shock to examine its effect on internal control quality in mainland China. Using the difference-in-differences (DiD) method for a large sample of 17,910 firm-year observations from 2000 to 2014, we find that firms controlled by...

This study examines how the relationships between local governments and local enterprises moderate the effect of targeted monetary policies through different action-propagating mechanisms. First, we investigate the impact of monetary policies on enterprise investment in areas with different...

We examine the association between auditor choice and the accruals patterns of Chinese listed firms that cross-list in Hong Kong. Our evidence suggests that the clients of Big 4 auditors report lower unsigned discretionary accruals relative to the clients of non-Big 4 auditors. Further, we find...

We examine how concurrent enforcement changes affect the positive relationship between mandatory IFRS adoption and firms' voluntary disclosure. We show that the increase in the issuance of management forecasts after IFRS adoption is smaller for firms from IFRS-mandating countries with concurrent...

In this study we conduct firm-level analysis of the impact of women in the boardroom on corporate philanthropic disaster response (CPDR). We propose that CPDR contains agency costs and that female directors are more likely to restrain the associated agency costs of CPDR. We predict a negative...

In this paper, we investigate if dividend policy is influenced by ownership type. Within the dividend literature, dividends have a signaling role regarding agency costs, such that dividends may diminish insider conflicts (reduce free cash flow) or may be used to extract cash from firms...

According to optimal contracting theory, compensation contracts are effective in solving the agency problem between stockholders and managers. Executive compensation is naturally related to firm performance. However, contracts are not always perfect. Managers may exert influence on the...