This paper investigates whether presentation of special items within the financial statements reflects the firm's underlying economic performance or opportunism. We examine the presentation of recognized special items either as a separate line item on the income statement or aggregated within...

I use a sample of 409 companies that restated their earnings from 1997 to 2001 to examine penalties for outside directors, particularly audit committee members, when their companies experience accounting restatements. Penalties from lawsuits and Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) actions...

<heading id="h1" level="1" implicit="yes" format="display">ABSTRACT</heading>In this paper, we examine the economic impact of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX) by analyzing foreign listing behavior onto U.S. and U.K. stock exchanges before and after the enactment of SOX in 2002. Using a sample of all listing events onto U.S. and U.K. exchanges from 1995-2006, we...

We examine which independent directors are held accountable when investors sue firms for financial and disclosure-related fraud. Investors can name independent directors as defendants in lawsuits, and they can vote against their reelection to express displeasure over the directors’...

We examine chief executive officer (CEO) compensation, CEO retention policies, and mergers and acquisition (M&A) decisions in firms in which founders serve as a director with a nonfounder CEO (founder-director firms). We find that founder-director firms offer a different mix of incentives to...

We analyze the disclosure practices of companies as a function of their interaction with U.S. markets for a group of 794 firms from 24 countries in the Asia-Pacific and Europe. Our analysis uses the Transparency and Disclosure scores developed recently by Standard & Poor's. These scores rate the...