The China Securities Regulatory Commission (CSRC) launched the Campaign for Strengthening Corporate Governance of Public Companies in 2007. As part of this pilot program, public firms were required to report to CSRC whether their boards had established audit committees and whether these audit...

Clawback policies are compensation recovery policies that provide companies with the ability to recoup incentive-based compensation in the event of a financial fraud. We investigate whether the mandatory clawback provision in the Dodd-Frank Act is necessary or whether existing provisions under...

Sarbanes Oxley Act (SOX) Section 407 requires firms to disclose if there is a financial expert serving on their audit committees. The extant literature has largely documented SOX 407 benefits, ranging from controlling earning management to reducing internal control weaknesses. Our paper...

This study examines whether having accounting experts on audit committees can mitigate the upward bias of expected rates of return (ERR) on pension plan assets documented in prior research. ERRs are found to be lower in firms with accounting expertise on their audit committees. These results are...

Cohen et al. (2008) document that firms switched from accrual-based earnings management (AEM) to real earnings management (REM) within three years after passage of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX) in 2002. A remaining question is how so many firms could have made the transition from one accounting...

We document that the initiation of audit committee interlocks is associated with contagion in reported special items. We argue that this is, in part, attributable to contagion of accounting policy choices. We find that the special items of newly interlocked firms, unrelated before interlock,...