Events leading up to the implementation of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 (SOX) increased the public's focus on corporate governance and increased regulatory scrutiny of corporate governance mechanisms. These events also contributed to a massive restructuring in the audit market which resulted...

In this paper, we study a sample of companies that fail to remediate previously-disclosed material weaknesses (MWs) in their internal control systems and thus disclose the same MWs in two consecutive annual reports. Their failure to remediate is surprising given that regulators, credit rating...

Studying the determinants of management forecast precision is important because a better understanding of the factors affecting management’s choice of forecast precision can provide investors and other users with cues about the characteristics of the information contained in the forecasts. In...

We examine whether three tax system characteristics – required book-tax conformity, worldwide versus territorial approach, and perceived strength of enforcement – impact corporate tax avoidance across countries after controlling for firm-specific factors previously shown to be associated...

We re-examine the widely held belief that analysts' earnings per share (EPS) forecasts are superior to random walk (RW) time-series forecasts. We investigate whether analysts' annual EPS forecasts are superior, and if so, under what conditions. Simple RW EPS forecasts are more accurate than...

We examine whether income tax disclosures under International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) are useful for predicting changes in future earnings and cash flows, and whether such disclosures are more or less useful than disclosures made under U.S. Generally Accepted Accounting Principles...

Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) comment letters provide independent and timely feedback on the clarity of disclosures and on the extent to which filings comply with Generally Accepted Accounting Principles and SEC reporting regulations. We investigate factors that affect the probability...

We posit and find that the importance of analyst and forecast characteristics for analyst forecast accuracy varies with analysts' access to management's private information and with the precision of publicly available information. In particular, more experienced analysts and All-Star analysts do...

In this study, we investigate whether companies with better reputations enjoy a lower cost of equity financing. Using a sample of 9,276 large U.S. companies from 1987 through 2011 and the reputation rankings from Fortune's “America's Most Admired Companies List”, we find strong evidence that...

Accounting rules for valuing retained interest from securitizations require management to make assumptions concerning discount rates, default rates, and prepayment rates. These assumptions provide management with discretion to determine the “gain on sale” of the receivables. We investigate...