We study financial reporting and corporate governance in 218 companies accused of price fixing. These firms engage in evasive financial reporting strategies, including earnings smoothing, segment reclassification, and restatements. In corporate governance, cartel firms favor outside directors...

Insiders can artificially deflect the market prices of financial instruments from their full-information or inside value' by issuing deceptive accounting reports. Incentive support for disinformational activity comes through forms of compensation that allow corporate insiders to profit...

Since almost eliminating net debt, the Australian Government%u2019s attention has turned to the financing of broader balance sheet liabilities, such as public sector superannuation. Australia will be developing a significant financial asset portfolio in the %u2018Future Fund%u2019 to smooth the...

Proactive deleveraging from all-time peak market leverage (ML) to near-zero ML and negative net debt is the norm among 4,476 nonfinancial firms with five or more years of post-peak data. ML is 0.543 at the historical peak and 0.026 at the later trough for the median firm in this sample, with a...

Life insurers use accounting and actuarial techniques to smooth reporting of firm assets and liabilities, seeking to transfer surpluses in good years to cover benefit payouts in bad years. Nevertheless, these techniques been criticized as they make it difficult to assess insurers' true financial...

We hypothesize that, in their annual accounting reports, insurers allocate premiums and losses from multistate policies to reduce total state taxes. To test this prediction, we examine firm-level data, collected from the publicly-available statutory reports used to compute tax bases and filed...

This paper comprehensively reviews Accounting for Income Taxes (AFIT). The first half provides background and a primer on AFIT. The second half reviews existing studies in detail and offers suggestions for future research. We emphasize the research questions that have been addressed (most of...

Classic Big Push industrialization envisions state planners coordinating economic activity to internalize a range of externalities that otherwise lock in a low-income equilibrium, but runs afoul of well-known government failure problems. Successful Big Push coordination may occur instead when a...

This paper, which introduces the special issue on corporate governance co-sponsored by the Review of Financial Studies and the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), reviews and comments on the state of corporate governance research. The special issue features seven papers on corporate...

This paper estimates the effect of corporate governance provisions on shareholder value and long-term outcomes in S&P1500 firms. We apply a regression discontinuity design to shareholder votes on governance proposals in annual meetings. A close-call vote around the majority threshold is akin to...