The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) uses information in firms’ public disclosures as well as private tax returns to detect tax noncompliance. Consistent with managers perceiving that material contracts contain information that could be useful to the resource-constrained IRS for its enforcement...

We test whether firms that exclude the effects of amortization from their non-GAAP earnings allocate more of an acquisition’s purchase price to definite-lived intangible assets (DLIA). This strategy can yield two potential benefits: it can (1) increase non-GAAP earnings by shifting...

Firm managers make ethical decisions regarding the form and quality of disclosure. Disclosure can have long-term implications for performance, earnings manipulation, and even fraud. We investigate the impact of venture capital (VC) backing on the quality and informativeness of disclosure...

We find that the perverse effect of equity incentives on financial misreporting is weaker for older chief financial officers (CFOs) than for younger CFOs. We attribute this to differences in risk preferences associated with age. Consistent with our attribution, we find that the difference is...

Studying the determinants of management forecast precision is important because a better understanding of the factors affecting management’s choice of forecast precision can provide investors and other users with cues about the characteristics of the information contained in the forecasts. In...

We test whether agency conflicts generated by the divergence between insider voting rights and cash flow rights (i.e., disproportionate insider control) within dual-class firms reduce the informativeness of stock returns about future earnings. We find that the future earnings response...