We investigate the relationship between auditor brand name, industry specialization, and earnings management as measured by discretionary accruals for a sample of listed companies in Taiwan, where the litigation risk against auditors is much less than the risk in the USA. We find that the use of...

Purpose – This paper investigates the relationship between audit quality (as measured by auditor size and industry specialization) and earnings management (as measured by unexpected accruals) for Taiwan IPO firms.Design/methodology/approach – First uses unexpected accruals in the modified...

This paper documents stock market responses to the arrest of Shanghai's top leader by the Chinese central government in September 2006. The effects of personal-level and organizational-level connections to the local state are found to be negative and insignificant, respectively, on cumulative...

Purpose – To investigate the recommendations of the Blue Ribbon Committee (BRC) and the requirements of the Sarbanes‐Oxley Act (SOX) on audit committee alignment.Design/methodology/approach – Using a unique set of hand collected data on audit committees for a sample of 129 firms during...

This study investigates how discretionary accruals affect earnings valuation (or price-earnings multiples) to provide indirect evidence on whether managers use their discretion over accruals to communicate their private information or to obtain private benefits. The results indicate that...

We predict that managers of firms in countries where languages do not require speakers to grammatically mark future events perceive future consequences of earnings management to be more imminent, and therefore, they are less likely to engage in earnings management. Using data from 38 countries...

We examine the relationship between audit committee directors' unequal allocation of attention to multiple directorships and firms' earnings management. We find that firms with a greater proportion of audit committee directors for whom the directorship is more important than their other...

We examine the effect of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX) on the extent of aggressive/conservative reporting behavior of public companies. SOX imposes considerably greater potential penalties on CEO/CFOs who engage in financial wrongdoing; therefore, risk averse managers are likely to report lower...

Using a sample of hand-collected data on 821 firms, which dismissed Arthur Andersen as their auditor between October 15, 2001 and August 31, 2002, we investigate the role of audit committees and boards of directors in the auditor switch decisions by Andersen's clients. This provides a unique...

We study auditors' client risk management in the first year of SOX 404 implementation, and find that there exists a pecking order among auditors' strategies to manage control risk resulting from internal control weaknesses. We first examine the relations between internal control weaknesses and...