We track the fortunes of all 2,206 individuals identified as responsible parties for all 788 SEC and Department of Justice enforcement actions for financial misrepresentation from 1978 through September 30, 2006. Fully 93% lose their jobs by the end of the regulatory enforcement period. A...

When public firms collapse amid allegations of financial information failure - such as misleading financial statements - society looks beyond the role of accountants to see who else should be held responsible. Lawyers advising the firm increasingly are charged with responsibility, perhaps...

We examine the effect of litigation risk on management's decision to issue earnings forecasts. We use a new ex ante measure of litigation risk, namely, the Directors and Officers liability insurance premium. This measure bypasses significant problems associated with the estimation of ex ante...

In this study, we examine whether managers delay disclosure of bad news relative to good news. If managers accumulate and withhold bad news up to a certain threshold, but leak and immediately reveal good news to investors, then we expect the magnitude of the negative stock price reaction to bad...

This study examines whether managers strategically alter disclosure ldquo;qualityrdquo; in response to personal incentives, specifically those derived from trading on their own account. Using changes in market liquidity to proxy for disclosure quality, I find that trading incentives are...

This paper examines the economic consequences of mandatory IFRS reporting around the world. We analyze the effects on market liquidity, cost of capital and Tobin's q in 26 countries using a large sample of firms that are mandated to adopt IFRS. We find that, on average, market liquidity...

Thousands of US companies appear to have secretly backdated stock options. This paper analyzes three forms of secret option backdating: (1) the backdating of executives' option grants; (2) the backdating of non-executive employees' option grants; and (3) the backdating of executives' option...

Shareholder rights and director remuneration represents a highly debated but still controversial issue in corporate governance. The purpose of this study was to explore why blockholder-dominated listed firms use stock options as directors' remuneration tools. By using a unique hand-collected...

This paper outlines the evolution of the information environment surrounding the Warsaw Stock Exchange in Poland. Like other transition economies, Poland's economy needed to develop accounting regulations to support privatization. We trace changes in financial reporting regulation from 1994,...

We compare the quality of accounting numbers produced by two types of public firms - those with publicly-traded equity and those with privately-held equity that are nonetheless considered public by virtue of having publicly-traded debt. We develop and test two hypotheses. The quot;demandquot;...