societal corruption and illegality, and approaches that go beyond the two dominant areas of accounting and audit research on … fraud, namely on fraud detection and prevention through auditing procedures and studies of the capital market effects of … accounting frauds. We emphasize three themes: the importance of contextualizing fraud, the social construction of fraud and …

Corporate and securities laws are seen to mitigate corporate fraud by 'manipulating the incentives of agents …': presenting corporate agents with a probability of being caught and punished if they commit fraud. This article suggests that the … same laws also affect corporate fraud in a significant but unappreciated manner, by 'manipulating the perceptions of the …