We study the consequences of firm-specific stock price crashes (SPCs) by examining whether, and if so, how SPCs affect market information efficiency. This contrasts with prior research that focuses on firm-specific causes or determinants of SPCs. The tension underlying our research question...

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...

The IRS uses information contained in financial statements as well as tax returns to detect tax avoidance behavior. We examine the impact on corporate tax avoidance behavior of reductions in the IRS's information processing costs resulting from the mandatory adoption of XBRL for financial...

This study examines the association between chief executive officer (CEO) overconfidence and future stock price crash risk. Overconfident managers overestimate the returns to their investment projects and misperceive negative net present value (NPV) projects as value creating. They also tend to...

Using a large sample of U.S. firms during 1964–2007, we find that conditional conservatism is associated with a lower likelihood of a firm's future stock price crashes. This finding holds for multiple measures of conditional conservatism and crash risk and is robust to controlling for other...

This paper documents a negative relation between equity short interest and future returns on credit default swaps (CDS). This relation is most consistent with the theory that equity short interest telegraphs relevant information to secondary market CDS investors about credit spread not...

This study investigates whether and how the deviation of cash flow rights (ownership) from voting rights (control), or simply the ownership-control wedge, influences the likelihood that extreme negative outliers occur in stock return distributions, which we refer to as stock price crash risk. We...

Using a large sample of U.S. audit client firms over the period 2000-2005, this paper investigates whether and how the size of a local practice office within an audit firm (henceforth, office size) is a significant, engagement-specific factor determining audit quality and audit fees over and...

Using a sample of 9,820 firm-year observations over the 2000-2003 period, this paper examines whether, and how, audit quality proxied by unsigned discretionary accruals is associated with the abnormal audit fee, i.e., the difference between actual audit fee and auditors' expectation on the...

We study the effect of a mandatory improvement in public disclosure due to the adoption of International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) on the stock return predictability of shorting activity. To assess the impact of the disclosure shock, we measure monthly changes in the demand for and...