This paper examines the role of CEO integrity in determining whether a company's earnings benchmarks will be met, beaten or missed. Prior literature has provided evidence that managers have incentives for meeting or beating earnings benchmarks and are rewarded by the market for doing so (Lopez...

Focusing on the merger of Price Waterhouse and Coopers & Lybrand in 1998, we document increased audit quality (measured by earnings quality of the clients) for the merged firm and other big-X auditors 1 during the post-merger period because: 1) controlling for economic conditions, clients of...

Classical agency theory argues that economic incentives can have a strong impact on opportunistic reporting behavior. On the other hand, behavioral literature suggests that agents also adhere to descriptive norms established by peers. Most studies examine these effects in isolation, ignoring the...

We examine the relation between a measure of male CEOs' facial masculinity and financial misreporting. Facial masculinity is associated with a complex of masculine behaviors (including aggression, egocentrism, risk-seeking, and maintenance of social status) in males. One possible mechanism for...