This study documents a substantial impact of Big4 auditor choice on the sale proceeds of controlling interests of U.S. private firms. A representative private stock-purchase company with median enterprise value ranging from $14 to 18 million experiences a dollar value decrease in enterprise...

Despite the importance of sell-side financial analysts as information intermediaries in the capital market, little is known about how managerial equity ownership associates with their information environment. Using Barron, Kim, Lim and Stevens' (1998) framework of measuring information...

The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation Improvement Act (FDICIA) of 1991 was designed, among other things, to introduce risk-based deposit insurance, increase capital requirements, and improve banks' internal controls. Of particular interest in this study are the requirements for annual audit...

International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) have recently been adopted in a number of jurisdictions, including the European Union. Despite the importance of IFRS in the context of global accounting standards harmonization, little is known regarding what institutional factors influence...

International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) have recently been adopted in a number of jurisdictions, including the European Union. Despite the importance of IFRS in the context of global accounting standards harmonization, little is known regarding what institutional factors influence...

Using a sample of public and private banks, we study how social capital relates to bank stability. Social capital, which captures the level of cooperative norms in society, is likely to reduce opportunistic behavior (Jha and Chen 2015; Hasan et al. 2016) and, therefore, to act as an informal...

We study whether bank managers' use their discretion in estimating the allowance for loan losses (ALL) for efficiency or for opportunistic reasons. We do so by examining whether the use of this discretion relates to bank stability and bank risk taking, or whether it relates to earnings...

Using a sample of U.S. banks and indices for economic policy uncertainty and monetary policy uncertainty developed by Baker et al. (2016), we investigate whether these two sources of policy uncertainty affect bank earnings opacity. When economic and monetary policies are relatively uncertain, it...

We examine the unintended consequences of the 2005 increase in the asset threshold for FDICIA internal control reporting requirements from $500 million to $1 billion. We focus on a test sample of banks that grew from between $100 million to $500 million in assets prior to the change in...

We examine the ability of selected accounting and audit quality variables measured in a period prior to the financial crisis (i.e., the four quarters of 2006), to predict banks that subsequently failed during the financial crisis. These predictor variables include balance sheet strength, loan...