We investigate the influence of foreign institutional investors on firms' auditor choices in an international setting. Foreign institutional investors are likely to demand high-quality audits to mitigate the information asymmetry they face and facilitate their external monitoring when they...

In this paper, we first develop a model in which national legal environments play a crucial role in determining auditor effort and audit fees. Our model predicts that: (1) audit fees increase monotonically with the strength or strictness of a country’s legal liability regime; (2) given a legal...

This paper shows that politically connected non-Big 4/5 auditors are associated with lower levels of audit quality (proxied by the level of abnormal non-core earnings and the proportion of modified audit opinions) than firms with no political connections. We also show that more economically...

We examine the consequences of local laws modeled on the American Anti-Corruption Act (“AACA”), which aims to constrain corporate political activities. Consistent with these laws significantly increasing the costs of forging local political connections, we find a reduction in the likelihood...

This paper documents that policy uncertainty reduces future stock price crash risk. Our tests show that this negative relation is more pronounced among firms with more short-sale constraints, with no actively traded credit default swap contracts, or with higher firm-level political risks. The...

This study investigates the relation between common institutional ownership along the supply chain and earnings management by supplier firms. Using a sample of U.S. publicly traded firms for the period of 1980–2016, we find that common ownership along the supply chain reduces the level of a...

Using a large sample of U.S. firms for the period 1995-2008, we provide strong and robust evidence that corporate tax avoidance is positively associated with firm-specific stock price crash risk. This finding is consistent with the following view: Tax avoidance facilitates managerial rent...

This study investigates whether and how the information values of reported earnings and their components changed around the Asian financial crisis of 1997-1998. Regression analyses on a sample of 10,406 firm-years from nine Asian countries from 1995 to 2000 reveal the following. First, the...

Using a sample of non-U.S. firms from 22 countries during 2003–2007, we examine the effect of firm-level governance on various features of loan contracting in the international loan market. We find that banks charge lower loan rates, offer larger and longer-maturity loans, and impose fewer...