We examine the effects of the revised Basel II rules on bank managers’ discretionary behavior, specifically income smoothing and loan loss provisioning. As the revised rules exert greater regulatory pressure on corporate than retail banking, we predict corporate bank managers to reduce...

Prior research suggests that there are significant differences in how investors perceive the reliability of fair values across the fair value hierarchy. An unaddressed question in this stream of research is whether cross-country differences in institutional factors are able to mediate...

We examine the relation between auditor reputation and earnings management in banks using a sample of banks from 29 countries. In particular, we examine the implications of two aspects of auditor reputation, auditor type and auditor industry specialization, for earnings management in banks. We...

Using an international sample of firms from 25 countries and a country-level index for societal trust, we document that societal trust is negatively associated with tax avoidance, even after controlling for other institutional determinants such as home country legal institutions and tax system...