This study captures the presence of organized crime groups in the Italian territories and examines their relationship to firms that are in a condition of financial distress. At the end of the nineteenth century the first criminal groups emerged in the South of Italy as a response to the demand...

This article represents one of the pioneering efforts in the Chinese literature to systematically examine the role of gatekeepers in corporate governance. It seeks to explain how gatekeepers may function and malfunction, in light of the Enron scandal and the financial crisis of 2008, and draw...

We provide a lower-bound estimate of the undetected share of corporate fraud. To identify the hidden part of the "iceberg," we exploit Arthur Andersen's demise, which triggered added scrutiny on Arthur Andersen's former clients and thereby increased the detection likelihood of preexisting...

We estimate what percentage of firms engage in fraud and the economic cost of fraud. Our estimates are based on detected frauds, and frauds that we infer are started but are not caught. To identify the ‘iceberg' of undetected fraud we take advantage of an exogenous shock to the incentives for...

In the late 1990s, it was announced that Australia would introduce legislation to respond to an OECD Convention for criminalizing bribery of foreign public officials. This was part of a coordinated international OECD initiative. The US had already addressed such issues two decades earlier under...

This study examines whether and how anticorruption efforts may mitigate the risk of corporate fraud. Based on a sample of Chinese publicly listed firms over the period of 2008 to 2017, we find that anticorruption efforts reduce the likelihood of fraud commission and increase the likelihood of...

The year 2011 has marked a decade since the Enron collapse, considered the most emblematic corporate scandal worldwide. Despite its importance, few studies provide an integrated analysis of the underlying failures that allowed Enron's debacle, going beyond the traditional view that reduces the...

We investigate two under-explored factors in mitigating the risk of corporate fraud and regulatory enforcement against fraud, namely institutional investors and political connections. The role of institutional investors in the effective monitoring of a firm's management is well established in...