Using a sample of long-term supply contracts collected from SEC filings, I show that hold-up concerns and information asymmetry are important determinants of contract design. Asymmetric information between buyers and suppliers leads to shorter term contracts. However, when longer duration...

Reputation is a market mechanism widely believed to effectively resolve problems of asymmetric information. It relies, however, on consumers taking into account any available information on unobserved product characteristics (quality). Exploiting the natural experiment of Arthur Andersen's...

In latest decades, mainly with the advance of globalization and business expansion at worldwide level, with the diversification of the possible risks and with the uncertainty characterizing the business world, the demands on the type of information required by the ever-increasing competitive...

Does bad news about one auditor's conduct affect the credibility of all auditors? We examine auditee abnormal stock returns around twenty-five bad news events involving Arthur Andersen LLP's (Andersen) questionable audits of Waste Management, Sunbeam, and Enron. Of these twenty-five windows,...

Activities in all fields of activity are increasingly supported by the information and communication technologies.This study is the result of a research financed by the grant, called quot;FINAUDIT - information product for auditing the financial statements of economic agentsquot;. Thus, our...

Criminal prosecution of financial reporting-related corporate misconduct is generally acknowledged to be sometimes warranted. The decision to seek an indictment of Arthur Andersen remains controversial, however. Eisenberg and Macey (2004) posit that because the resulting increased concentration...

The largest CPA firms have been regarded as quality-differentiated auditors. This has been a prominent assumption of empirical research in accounting and auditing. Yet, prior research has only tested whether the largest CPA firms, in the aggregate, are quality-differentiated auditors. This paper...

Most studies of voluntary disclosure examine the securities market, where voluntary disclosure is incremental to the requirements of highly developed reporting standards. In this paper, I examine the market for new franchises, where there is no requirement that potential franchise investors be...

What drives investors' attention? We study how far in advance earnings calendars are pre-announced and find that investors are more attentive to earnings news when such details are disclosed well ahead of time. This variation in investors' attention affects stock prices, thereby creating...

We develop a unified treatment of a broad class of truthful disclosure games. Such games have, at most, one equilibrium that is reasonable given a commonly used signaling refinement. We provide a simple algorithm to construct the unique equilibrium strategy and beliefs, and identify necessary...