The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 (TCJA) eliminated disincentives for U.S. multinational corporations (MNCs) to repatriate foreign subsidiaries' earnings, but the TCJA included additional provisions that will impact U.S. firms' acquisition decisions. We find that both the likelihood and number...

In this study, we examine whether investors' actions to acquire accounting information are predictive of future firm performance because these actions partially reveal investors' private expectations of this performance. Using a database of EDGAR downloads, we find some evidence that information...

We use short interest as an investor-based measure of over/undervaluation that distinguishes between the misvaluation and Q-theories of mergers. Using this measure, we find that misvaluation is a strong determinant of merger decision making. Firms in the top quintile of short interest are 54%...

We provide evidence suggesting that managers use financial statement misstatements which improve reported results to facilitate acquisitions. Specifically, we find that firms misstating their financial statements are more likely to make stock-based acquisitions, but not cash-based acquisitions,...

Prior research documents improvements in pre-acquisition outcomes when acquirer and target firms engage the same audit firm to perform their financial statement audits before the acquisition. In contrast to prior studies, we examine whether the advantages of engaging a common auditor prior to an...

We test whether firms that exclude the effects of amortization from their non-GAAP earnings allocate more of an acquisition’s purchase price to definite-lived intangible assets (DLIA). This strategy can yield two potential benefits: it can (1) increase non-GAAP earnings by shifting...