Accounting is imperfect, leading to errors in financial reporting. This paper links accounting errors to firms' incentives to bias reported earnings. We hypothesize that while errors discourage reporting bias by lowering earnings' value relevance, they also incentivize bias by providing...

EBITDA is a commonly-used performance measure for (1) valuation, (2) debt contracting, and (3) executive compensation. The widespread use of EBITDA by stakeholders may induce managers to focus their attention on EBITDA. Since EBITDA excludes various expenses, managers who fixate on EBITDA may...

We consider a model of external financing in which privately informed entrepreneurs seek funds from competitive financiers. The literature restricts attention to monotonic securities and finds that straight debt is the uniquely optimal. Monotonicity is justified by the argument that it would...

I examine the effect of the disclosure of pending lawsuits in 10-K/Q filings on the contractual terms of newly issued bonds. I find that firms' decision to disclose pending lawsuits and the amount of disclosed information (i.e., the level of disclosure) have opposite effects. Specifically, firms...

In state owned enterprises (SOEs), taxes are a dividend to the controlling shareholder, the state, but a cost to other shareholders. We examine publicly traded firms in China and find significantly lower tax avoidance by SOEs relative to non-SOEs. The differences are pronounced for locally...

In choosing transparency, firms must trade off the benefits from better access to finance against the cost of a greater tax burden. We study this trade-off in a model with distortionary taxes and endogenous rationing of external finance. The evidence from two different data sets, one formed only...

We demonstrate that managers' “normal” operating decisions associated with large (positive or negative) net external financing activities are likely to lead to significant measurement errors in unexpected accruals. The problem occurs pervasively in samples drawn from different time periods,...

Errors and bias are both inherent features of accounting. In theory, while errors discourage bias by lowering the value relevance of accounting, they can also facilitate bias by providing camouflage. Consistent with theory, we find a hump-shaped relation between a firm's propensity to engage in...

Prior research documents that markets efficiently impound pension plan risk into a defined benefit plan's market value. This study adds to these prior works by investigating how audit quality affects the pension risk – cost of equity relation. Using proxies to measure pension intensity, and...