We examine the association between real earnings management and the cost of new bond issues of U.S. corporations. We consider three types of real earnings management: sales manipulation, overproduction, and the abnormal reduction of discretionary expenditures. We find that overproduction impairs...

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...

This study examines whether real earnings smoothing influences equity and credit investors’ perceptions of risk. Using a large sample of U.S. public firms, we find that real earnings smoothing is negatively associated with option-implied volatility, suggesting that real earnings smoothing...

We investigate how local political corruption shapes corporate financial reporting conservatism. Using a large sample of U.S. public firms, we find that firms located in areas with higher levels of political corruption tend to adopt greater accounting conservatism. This finding is robust to...

This study examines the relation between narrative risk disclosures in mandatory reports and the pricing of credit risk. In particular, we investigate whether and how the SEC mandate of risk factor disclosures (RFDs) affects credit default swap (CDS) spreads. Based on the theory of Duffie and...

This paper presents large-sample evidence that firms consider labor unemployment risk when setting their resource adjustment policies. Prior studies find that costs rise more in response to sales increases than they fall in response to sales decreases. Anderson, Banker, and Janakiraman (2003)...

Using the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission's mandate of extensible Business Reporting Language (XBRL) as a natural experiment, this study investigates whether and how the decreased information-processing costs brought about by XBRL influence firms' breadth of share ownership. We find that...

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 study investigates the hitherto unexplored questions of whether and how a material weakness in internal control over financial reporting (ICW) and its disclosure influence the occurrence of extreme negative outliers in stock return distributions, which we refer to as stock price crash risk....

Our study examines whether CPA firms take measures to improve their audit quality and restore trust among investors when their reputations are in danger subsequent to disciplinary actions by the government regulatory agencies in China. Compared with a control group of the CPA firms without a...