We examine the relation between passive ownership and financial reporting quality measured by Beneish's (1999) earnings' manipulation score (M-score). We find that passive ownership is negatively related to M-score and to the likelihood of being designated as a “manipulator” firm. However,...

The empirical literature often theorizes that managerial overconfidence exacerbates earnings management because overconfidence sends the manager ``down the slippery slope to misreporting". In a principal-agent model with moral hazard, I show that overconfidence only increases the manager's...

Firms commonly use disaggregated accounting information to facilitate efficient contracting over intangible assets. However, reliance on accounting measures creates information asymmetries and thus a role for contract audits. Using a hand-collected sample of technology licensing agreements with...

This monograph is not a review of the empirical accounting literature. This monograph tells a story and relates it to salient empirical phenomena. Why does accounting exist? Our answer is that financial accounting helps firms function efficiently. That efficiency is manifested in many ways, and...

In this study, we examine whether the monetary incentives associated with equity ownership (broadly defined to include stock and stock options) induce managers to maintain strong internal controls. Supporting the notion that equity ownership provides management incentive to strengthen the...

Many existing earnings management studies establish earnings management detection criteria by examining the statements of every organization under review for a significant period of time. While being suitable for the academia, this approach cannot be adopted by the practitioners, who do not have...

We study whether bank managers' use their discretion in estimating the allowance for loan losses (ALL) for efficiency or for opportunistic reasons. We do so by examining whether the use of this discretion relates to bank stability and bank risk taking, or whether it relates to earnings...

We examine differences in audit scope between family and non-family firms in Israel, using a unique database that includes both external and internal audit fees, hours, and billing rates. Consistent with prior literature, we argue that the number of audit hours reflects an auditor’s effort,...

This study examines whether boards of directors use external auditing to protect their reputation capital. We hypothesize and find that audit quality increases with the level of directors' reputation capital. More specifically, using ten-year panel data on Finnish listed companies, we find that...

This paper examines how accounting audits impact investment decisions in the presence of agency conflicts. Investors choose between a short-term risk-free asset and a long-term risky project. The manager in charge of the latter has incentives to inflate interim payoffs to be able to continue a...