We provide evidence that distinguishes between competing production cost-based explanations of how to interpret unusually high (or low) audit fees and their expected relation with accounting quality. Abnormally high or low fees are typically proxied by the residuals obtained from fee models....

Using a large sample of earnings press releases by Australian firms, we compare multiple attributes of non-GAAP earnings measures with their closest GAAP equivalent. We find that, on average, non-GAAP earnings are more persistent, smoother, more value-relevant, and have higher predictive power...

We revisit the asymmetric timeliness of earnings as proposed by Basu (1997). For a large sample of US firm years from 1970-2019, we show that earnings are asymmetrically timely with respect to bad economic news, and that this is robust to the declining timeliness of good news, different time...

We demonstrate that managers' “normal” operating decisions associated with large (positive or negative) net external financing activities are likely to lead to significant measurement errors in unexpected accruals. The problem occurs pervasively in samples drawn from different time periods,...

We examine whether the provision of non-audit services (NAS) by incumbent auditors is associated with a reduction in the extent of "news-based" earnings conservatism (i.e., the differential extent to which earnings reflect bad news on a timely basis). Reduced earnings conservatism is expected to...