We examine whether future shareholder activism is associated with current financial reporting quality. Activism refers to actions taken by shareholders to change firm policies and practices. If issues are present in an investee's financial reports, we expect shareholders to act to improve...

We provide the first, large sample evidence on firms’ voluntary, third-party verification of environmental and social metrics in ESG reports (“ESG assurance”) in the United States. Focusing on S&P 500 firms from 2010-2020, we document a striking increase in ESG assurance. Unlike financial...

The recent financial crisis has led to a major debate about fair-value accounting. Many critics have argued that fair-value accounting, often also called mark-to-market accounting, has significantly contributed to the financial crisis or, at least, exacerbated its severity. In this paper, we...

In this paper, we present a review of tax research. We survey four main areas of the literature: 1) the informational role of income tax expense reported for financial accounting, 2) corporate tax avoidance, 3) corporate decision-making including investment, capital structure, and organizational...