There is a profound gap between models of accounting conservatism and the proxies for conditional conservatism currently used by the empirical literature. Not one of the proxies employed by the empirical literature to date obtains from a rigorous definition of conditional conservatism. In...

Using the exogenous reforms to audit committees mandated by the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 and a difference-in-difference approach, we examine the impact of changes in audit committee attributes (financial expertise, size, and independence) on firms' audit inputs and financial reporting quality....

Motivated by theoretical models in economics which show that there is matching between CEO skill and firm size, we introduce a new measure of director skill which is based on the aggregate size of firms on which the director serves as an independent director. We validate our measure by showing...

This study compares the pricing of credit risk information conveyed by accounting numbers under IFRS relative to local GAAP. We measure the price of credit risk by CDS spreads and focus on three fundamental accounting metrics that inform about credit risk: earnings, leverage and book value...

We examine whether financial and non-financial variables, separately and in tandem, are value relevant in explaining market returns, equity values and the degree of investment by sophisticated investors for a sample of drug development companies. Patent counts, number of collaborations and...

Motivated by theoretical models in economics which show that there is matching between CEO skill and firm size, we introduce a new measure of director skill which is based on the aggregate size of firms on which the director serves as an independent director. We validate our measure by showing...

Form 8-K reports filed with the SEC often exhibit lags raising the potential for information leakage that could be exploited by informed traders. This study provides evidence that institutional investors are able to capitalize on 8-K filing lags. Consistent with extant theories, this study...

We examine the informativeness and credibility of independent directors' stated resignation reasons. We posit that having access to private information, directors may resign in anticipation of weak future underperformance to limit damage to their reputation, and further have an incentive to mask...