We assess the impact of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX) on discretionary accruals (DA) and real earnings management (REM) activities around CEO turnovers. Improved corporate governance post-SOX can either deter earnings management (the deterrence effect) or pressure CEOs to inflate earnings when...

Corporate governance literature advances the idea that certain aspects of board of directors' structure improve monitoring of managerial decisions. Among these is the managers' decision to manage earnings. Prior studies have shown that earnings management, in widely-held public companies, is...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to investigate the relationship between internal control, economic policy uncertainty, and performance of cross-border merger and acquisition (M&A) based on the panel data of Chinese listed firms. The authors expected that internal control has a positive...

The information systems literature and the public press have called for organizations to more closely scrutinize their information technology (IT) controls; however, little more than anecdotal evidence exists on the business value of IT internal control investments, beyond regulatory compliance....

Early empirical studies find a negative association between firm performance and shareholder activism, whereas more recent studies document a positive association. We argue and theoretically show that this change in behavior results from mandating executive compensation disclosure. We develop a...

We examine the relation between internal control quality and the accuracy of management guidance. Consistent with managers in firms with ineffective internal controls relying on erroneous internal management reports when forming guidance, we document less accurate guidance among firms reporting...

This paper investigates whether managers' presentation of special items within the financial statements reflects economic performance or opportunism. Specifically, we assess special items presented as a separate line item on the income statement (income statement presentation) to those...

Previous literature investigates links between corporate social responsibility (CSR), earnings management (EM), and firm performance (FP) but has looked at pair-wise relations (CSR-EM, CSR-FP, and EM-FP) for one-way effects without considering endogeneity among the variables. We examine these...