Financial reports should provide useful information to shareholders and creditors. Directors, however, normally owe fiduciary duties to equity holders, not creditors. We examine whether this slant in fiduciary duties affects the likelihood that firms will use financial engineering to circumvent...

Using the exogenous reforms to audit committees mandated by the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 and a difference-in-difference approach, we examine the impact of changes in audit committee attributes (financial expertise, size, and independence) on firms' audit inputs and financial reporting quality....

Analysts' functions are divided into discovery and interpretation roles, but separating between the two is non-trivial. We conjecture that analysts' interpretation skill can be gauged by their forecast revisions following material unanticipated news — in particular following non-earnings 8-K...

Using a comprehensive sample of non-earnings 8-K filings from 2005–2013, we examine whether firms engage in strategic reporting of mandatory and voluntary news. In particular, we examine whether firms report negative news when investor attention is low, and whether firms bundle positive and...

We examine the informativeness and credibility of independent directors' stated resignation reasons. We posit that having access to private information, directors may resign in anticipation of weak future underperformance to limit damage to their reputation, and further have an incentive to mask...