Prior research hypothesizes managers strategically time retail price promotions to manage reported earnings. However, the reaction of competitors to such real earnings management behavior is less well studied. Consistent with the prior research, I show evidence that firms use fiscal quarter-end...

In this paper, the influence of large shareholders on earnings management in family-owned firms is analyzed using a sample of firms from nine European countries. How contests for control for the largest shareholder and the existence of a controlling coalition in family-owned firms affect...

One of the goals of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (hereafter SOX) was to restore confidence in financial reporting by providing incentive for firms to report financial results that reflect the underlying economic performance. Early findings are inconclusive on the success of the Act. Cohen, Dey and Lys...

We examine whether financial reporting frequency affects the speed with which accounting information is reflected in security prices. For a sample of 28,824 reporting-frequency observations from 1950 to 1973, we find little evidence of differences in timeliness between firms reporting quarterly...

Enron's collapse is generally viewed as a morality tale - the natural result of managerial greed, a clueless board, and feckless gatekeepers. But none of these aspects of the story clearly distinguishes Enron from other major firms during the bubble era of the late 90s. This material identifies...

I address the interaction between accounting conservatism and real options in both a staged investment and abandonment model. An accounting policy biased towards classifying a Good (Bad) project as Bad (Good) is conservative (aggressive). The accounting signal is optimally conservative when the...

Using publicly available data from annual reports, we find that SEC rule changes (33-8128 and 33-8644) that impose time pressure on the audits of registered firms have a negative impact on earnings quality, which we interpret as evidence of lower audit quality. Consistent with our predictions,...

This paper presents a model showing that accounting conservatism affects creditor coordination when the borrowing firm is in financial distress. There are two effects. First, accounting conservatism tends to reduce dividend payments and to keep assets within the firm (dividend restriction...

In this paper, I present evidence that the asymmetry in cash flows biases standard measures of conditional conservatism. First, the magnitude of the asymmetric timeliness coefficient decreases substantially (by 28–58%) when the dependent variable is accruals in the Basu (1997) model. Second,...

This paper examines how one aspect of earnings quality - discretionary accruals - affects subsequent capital investment pattern and efficiency. We find that, conditional on investment opportunities, investment in fixed assets in period t is less sensitive to internal cash flows for firms with...