We investigate the association between financial restatements and internal controls by examining whether voluntary restatement decisions are associated with internal control quality. We focus on companies' voluntary restatements because they are more susceptible to the numerous provisions...

This study examines three research questions. First, did accrual reliability improve in the post-SOX period? Second, do companies receiving higher-quality audits report accruals that are more reliable? Third, did the degree of SOX-related improvement in accrual reliability vary across companies...

The association of a country's investor protection regime with the quality of reported earnings is examined for a large sample of firms from 42 countries. Three attributes of earnings are evaluated: the magnitude of the association of a country's investor protection regime with the quality of...

The Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 (SOX) proscribes so-called “affiliated hires” of financial executives. More specifically, SOX requires that firms wait at least one year before hiring an individual recently employed as a member of the firm’s external audit team. The intent of the regulation...

This study examines whether audit committee and board characteristics are related to earnings management by the firm. A negative relation is found between audit committee independence and abnormal accruals. A negative relation is also found between board independence and abnormal accruals....

Prior literature suggests a positive relationship between financial reporting quality and the presence of accounting experts on audit committees. This study investigates the association between accruals quality and the characteristics of accounting experts and mix of accounting and...

Auditors are the gatekeepers to the public securities markets and their independence is central to the effectiveness of auditors as gatekeepers. Our general interest is on independence and we investigate how financial and non-financial incentives affect choices made by an auditor-gatekeeper...

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,...

Mandatory audit partner rotation has been adopted in certain countries while audit firm rotation is still being debated in many places. Most of the extant research on the relation between auditor tenure and earnings quality provides evidence at the audit firm level. However, since audit firm...

This paper examines the effect of financial restatements on the firm's source of debt financing, contractual debt covenants and cost of debt, both in the public and the private debt markets. Using a sample of public debt issued, we find evidence of higher treasury-spreads post restatement, which...