The period 2007-2010 marked one of the most severe economic and financial crises in living memory. In this paper we focus on two of accounting's key functions within organizations and markets, financial reporting and governance. In this respect we find that accounting exhibited shortcomings in...

Financial misrepresentation has usually been analysed by large-scale empirical research. However the generality gained from such an approach is at the cost of understanding the rich and complex nature of financial misrepresentation in real organizations. We adopt a case study approach to gain...

Many recent studies explore how earnings properties such as opacity, conservatism, and comparability relate to stock price crash risk. Motivated by the importance of earnings guidance as a voluntary disclosure mechanism that directly provides new information to the market, we investigate how...

The questions of whether there ever existed excessive risk-taking incentives from executive compensation in the financial industry, and whether top executives of financial services firms actually responded to such excessive incentives that eventually led to the crisis remain unanswered. The...

Bank executives' compensation has been widely identified as a culprit in the Global Financial Crisis, and reform of banker pay is high on the public policy agenda. While Congress targeted its reforms primarily at bankers' equity-based pay incentives, empirical research fails to show any...

This paper contributes to the literature that analyses the relationship between Share-Option Based Compensation (SOBC) expense and shareholder returns. It utilises a sample of financial firms listed in the European Economic Area and Switzerland between 2005 and 2016 to make inferences about the...

The advent of the Great Recession in 2008 was the culmination of a perfect storm of lax regulation, a growing housing bubble, rising popularity of derivatives instruments, and questionable banking practices. In addition to these causes, management incentives, as well as certain US accounting...

Prudential regulation of financial institutions relies on asset values measured based on accounting standards. This paper examines how this regulation affects financial institutions' incentives to use Level 2 versus Level 3 fair value reporting and how their endogenous choice affects systemic...

We examine the effects of CEO turnover in banks. Incoming bank CEOs face problems from information asymmetry because banks' operations are opaque and bank risk can change dramatically in a short time. Incoming bank CEOs may therefore change bank policies to manage their personal risks. Since CEO...

The seeds for the 2007-09 financial collapse were sewn over many years and nurtured by ill-advised governmental housing policy, the presence of pervasive fraud both large and small and the widespread failure of personal integrity. A chronology of bad choices made by individuals and the...