In this paper we address two important questions that emerged in the aftermath of the recent banking crisis. First, did the financial statements of the bank holding companies provide an early warning of their impending distress? Second, whether the actions of four key financial intermediaries...

This paper empirically examines the association between bank capital and banks' monitoring effort. We use four proxies to measure the unobservable monitoring effort. Two of the proxies are based on loan quality (ex-post outcomes of monitoring effort). The other two proxies are based on salary...

This paper uses confidential data on audit engagement partner names from regulatory filings of bank holding companies (BHC) to investigate whether partners display individual style that affects the financial reporting of the BHCs. We focus on loan loss provisioning. We construct an audit...