How do firms repair their reputations after a serious accounting restatement? To answer this question, we review firms' press releases and identify 1,765 reputation-building actions taken by: (1) 94 restating firms in the periods before and after their restatement; and (2) a set of matched...

We provide a comprehensive overview of shareholder litigation against auditors since the passage of the PSLRA. The number of lawsuits per year has declined, dismissals have increased, and settlements in recent years have declined. Our study asks why. Because we find that the likelihood an...

How do firms repair their reputations after a serious accounting restatement? To answer this question, we review firms' press releases and identify 1,765 reputation-building actions taken by: (i) 94 restating firms in the periods before and after their restatement; and (ii) a set of matched...

We provide evidence on the long standing concern on auditor conflicts of interest from providing non-audit services (NAS) to audit clients by using rarely explored NAS fee data from 1978-80 Using this earlier setting, we find cross-sectional evidence of improved earnings quality when auditors...

The competitive target pay policy sets a target dollar number for total CEO compensation within a specified range of the amounts paid to a CEO’s peers chosen from similar sized firms in the same industry. If such a policy were widely adopted by compensation committees, we would observe a...

MSCI, widely considered the largest data provider to the ESG investment community, sells ESG ratings for companies and constructs its own ESG indexes based on such ratings. Such ESG indexes underlie the creation of several ESG ETFs (exchange traded funds) or mutual funds. Motivated by such...

In December 2004, the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) mandated the use of a fair value based measurement attribute to value employee stock options (ESOs) via FAS 123-R. In anticipation of FAS 123-R, between March 2004 and November 2005, several firms accelerated the vesting of ESOs...

Several recent papers assume that private information (PIN), proposed by Easley, Hvidkjaer and O'Hara (2002, 2004), is a determinant of stock returns. We replicate Easley, Hvidkjaer and O'Hara (2002) and show that while PIN does predict future returns in the sample they analyze, the effect is...

We recently conducted a comprehensive survey that analyzes how senior financial executives make decisions related to performance measurement and voluntary disclosure. In particular, we ask CFOs what earnings benchmarks they care about and which factors motivate executives to exercise discretion,...

We gather data from 77 current mid-level managers and 111 future entry-level managers, to investigate how they value stock options and restricted stock. We refer to our current and future manager groups collectively as quot;managers.quot; We supplement our manager data with a dozen field...