Not surprisingly, the recent accounting scandals look different when viewed from the perspectives of the political/regulatory process and of the market for corporate governance and financial reporting. We do not have the opportunity to observe a world in which either market or...

Income smoothing is a longstanding practice under the more general category of earnings management. As the name suggests, it consists of smoothing out the fluctuations of the income series. This article examines the association between the ownership and control structure, level of corporate...

This paper studies the effects of interlocked boards of directors on voluntary disclosures, governance practices and earnings quality. The Canadian environment, where director interlocks are prevalent, is examined. A checklist of twenty voluntary disclosure measures from proxy statements is...

Recent trends in corporate board composition indicate an increase in the appointment of directors with legal expertise. Using two financial reporting quality measures, accruals quality and discretionary accruals, we find – for a sample of Russell 1000 firms in 2003 and 2005 – that the...

We examine the relation between the relative amount of fees paid to auditors for non-audit services and the behavior of accrual measures. We extend prior research in two important directions. First, using a pooled sample of 2,295 firms for the fiscal year 2000, we find very little evidence of a...

The financial reporting and disclosure problems at Enron, as well as the high market valuations for its stock raise troubling questions about the performance of capital market intermediaries, regulators and governance experts whose are supposed to ensure the effective functioning of the stock...

This paper examines the economic relevance of the factors set forth under Section 408 of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act to guide the enhanced regulatory scrutiny of public company financial disclosures, as required under the Act. We interpret two of the factors, volatility and firm size, as predictors...

We add to the literature on mandatory auditor rotation by examining the Florida government audit environment in which there exist both rotation and non-rotation regimes and in which there exists an independent measure of the joint quality of the audit and of the financial statements of the...

Audit deficiencies have far-reaching implications on the users of financial reports, accounting firms and their clients, and the accounting profession. Section 104 of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 (USHR 2002) requires the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board to conduct inspections of each...

US public companies recently filed, for the second or third time, management and auditor reports on internal control as required by Section 404 of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 (404 reports). This Special Comment summarizes our experience and findings on the credit implications of these reports