The finance literature identifies two agency problems between managers and outside shareholders. First, there is a divergence-of-interests problem as management ownership falls. Second, there is an offsetting entrenchment problem when management ownership increases within intermediate regions of...

Executives are 'affiliated' if they previously worked for their companies' audit firms. I find most affiliations (71.3%) occur when auditors become employees of audit clients ('employment affiliations'), but affiliations also arise when companies hire executives' former CPA firms ('alma mater...

Agency problems can be mitigated through contracting, but contracts are often based upon accounting numbers prepared by management. For contracts to be enforced the accounting numbers must be reliable and so there is a demand for higher quality auditors when agency problems are more severe...

This paper investigates information disclosures made by chairpersons of boards of directors in 120 failing UK companies. There are four main findings. Firstly, chairpersons excessively blame poor performance on exogenous factors rather than managerial decisions. Secondly, almost half of...

This paper examines the causes of bankruptcy for a sample of 949 publicly quoted companies in the UK between 1987-94. The most important determinants of bankruptcy are profitability, leverage, cashflow, company size, industry sector and the economic cycle. In contrast to previous studies, this...

Acquirers are motivated to overstate earnings prior to stock-financed acquisitions. We hypothesize that audits help to detect and correct such overstatements. We test this using a difference-in-differences design, which compares audit adjustments to earnings for stock-financed and cash-financed...

Financial reports are prepared on a going-concern (GC) basis rather than a liquidation basis even when companies are highly distressed. This allows distressed companies to report book values of assets that greatly exceed their liquidation values, implying a lack of conservatism in the balance...

In an effort to make audit reports more informative to investors, the U.K. recently passed a new audit reporting standard that requires auditors to disclose the risks of material misstatement (RMMs) that had the greatest effect on the financial statement audit. Using short-window market...

Audit firms face conflicting incentives. On one hand, they are motivated to provide high quality audits in order to protect their reputations and avoid regulatory sanctions but, on the other hand, they also need to please their clients in order to increase their revenues. We argue that these...

Using proprietary data obtained from a local tax office in China, we examine the determinants of corporate tax audits and the consequences of those audits. We find that the tax authority is more likely to select a firm for an audit when the firm has a lower effective tax rate, a higher book-tax...