This study documents that big bath accounting following CEO turnovers is pervasive worldwide and shows that the extent to which CEOs engage in big bath accounting is associated with the degree of discretion they have available in their respective countries. Our analysis is based on a new...

In this paper, I show that CEO power, which arises from differences in national culture, can weaken a firm's governance. Based on a hand-collected dataset with more than 5,000 forced and voluntary CEO transitions across 37 countries, I find that CEOs are less likely to be dismissed for bad...