Over the past decade, a number of federal and state policies intended to stem the flow of illegal immigration have been implemented. In this paper, we focus on two initiatives: (a) Operation Streamline, as an example of increased border enforcement by the federal government, and (b) state-level...

Whistleblowers are ostensibly a valuable resource to regulators investigating securities violations, but whether there is a link between whistleblower involvement and the outcomes of enforcement actions is unclear. Using a dataset of employee whistleblowing allegations obtained from the U.S....

Whistleblowers are ostensibly a valuable resource to regulators investigating securities violations, but whether there is a link between whistleblower involvement and the outcomes of enforcement actions is unclear. Using a data set of employee whistleblowing allegations obtained from the U.S....

Most legal and economics scholars recognize both that the government needs information about taxpayers’ transactions in order to determine whether their reporting is honest, and that third-party reporting helps the government obtain that information. Given governments’ reliance on tax funds,...

This paper studies the effect of anti-bribery enforcement on the accrual quality of investigated firms and their peers. We analyze a hand-collected sample of 241 bribery cases investigated under the US Foreign Corruption Practices Act (FCPA) over the period 1978-2015. Exploiting the disclosure...

We propose and find that enhanced regulatory transparency facilitates alignment between private and public enforcement. Utilizing the SEC's 2004 decision to publicly disclose its comment letters, we explore the actions of a public enforcer (the SEC) and a private enforcer (shareholder...

The Dodd-Frank Act allows the SEC to choose either an internal administrative proceeding or a federal district court as an enforcement venue for resolving violations of federal securities laws. I first document that the SEC increased the use of administrative proceedings after Dodd-Frank. I next...

We find that the public disclosure of regulators' supervisory actions changes their enforcement behavior. Using a novel sample of enforcement actions and orders (EDOs) and the setting of the 1989 Financial Institutions Reform, Recovery, and Enforcement Act (FIRREA), which required public...

This paper provides a theoretical perspective on the effect of enforcement on auditor behavior and overall financial reporting quality. Therefore, we consider auditor conservatism as a strategy towards uncertainty, which might arise in highly discretionary accounting areas during the audit...