By imposing a market like governance and directing entrepreneurs towards professional management, debt, and especially business debt, can serve as a reliable signal for outside equity investors. Such signals of firm accountability can alleviate the stringent information asymmetry at the early...

We consider a model of external financing in which entrepreneurs are privately informed about the quality of their projects and seek funds from competitive financiers. The literature restricts attention to monotonic or ‘manipulation proof' securities and finds that straight debt is the unique...

In this paper, we present a theoretical model and empirical evidence on the effects of dynamic internal control performance on external financing choices of a company. Using both within-sample and difference-in-difference analysis, we find that after issuing internal control weakness (i.e. ICW)...

European regulators are concerned that US-based proxy advisors might export US corporate governance by not considering sufficiently the unique aspects of the local setting. In contrast, local proxy advisors are expected to have a deeper understanding of the local setting. Using the German...

While tax avoidance strategies result in greater after-tax cash flows, they can involve uncertain future outcomes, which can impose significant costs on firms. Thus, the extent to which tax avoidance increases firm risk is unclear. This paper re-examines the relation between tax avoidance and...

This paper provides a review of research on financial derivatives, with an emphasis on and comprehensive coverage of research published in 15 top accounting journals from 1996-2017. We begin with some brief institutional details about derivatives and then summarize studies explaining when and...

Auditing failures and scandals have become commonplace. In response, reformers (including the Kingman Review in the U.K and a recent report of the U.K.'s Competition and Market Authority) have proposed a variety of remedies, including prophylactic bans on auditors providing consulting services...

We examine voluntary disclosures made by issuers of initial coin offerings (ICOs) in their “white papers” and use them to rate the blockchain technology being developed by the ICO issuers. First, we find that most ICOs receive a low rating. In fact, over 80% of the ICOs do not need to use a...

We examine the relationship between pre-grant patent disclosure and analyst forecast accuracy. We take advantage of the passage of the American Inventor's Protection Act (1999) that mandates public disclosure of all the information in patent application documents within 18-months after initial...

We investigate the relation between investor horizon and disclosure policy. We develop and analyze a rational expectations model where the original investors commit to a disclosure policy. Counter to casual intuition, short-horizon investors prefer more disclosure and are willing to bear costs...