Abstract: While the debt contracting literature has extensively examined financial covenants, there has been little attention paid to audit-related covenants. We focus on a covenant that restricts the borrower from receiving a going-concern audit report (GCAR covenant). We hypothesize that a...

Agency conflicts between investors are particularly severe in the presence of high family and block-holder ownership. By focusing on a setting characterised by high ownership concentration, we study the role of independent directors in promoting transparency through increased disclosure. In our...

Financial derivatives play an increasingly common role in corporate tax avoidance. This paper takes a descriptive approach to answer the fundamental, yet under explored, questions of why derivatives are useful for corporate tax avoidance and how they fulfill this objective. To evaluate why, I...

Corporate governance reforms have become more intrusive for banks than might be thought appropriate for “ordinary corporates”. “Heavier” regulation in this area is justified by the public interest at stake in bank activity and the risk to the public interest if a bank is allowed to fail...

This study examines how the equity compensation of chief executive officers (CEO) and that of outside directors affect management earnings forecasts (MFs) and the relationship between these two positions in terms of compensation. Our evidence reveals that CEO (director) equity compensation is...

We examine whether syndicated loans securitized through collateralized loan obligations (CLOs) have more standardized financial covenants. We proxy for the standardization of covenants using the textual similarity of their contractual definitions. We find that securitized loans are associated...

We examine whether short sellers, as informed investors, take into consideration corporate social responsibility (CSR) performance and disclosure in the areas of environmental, social, and governance (ESG) sustainability in making investment decisions. We find that firms' market value and future...

Business sustainability has emerged as the theme of the 21st century. We examine whether and how different components of economic sustainability disclosure (ECON), as well as environmental, social, and governance (ESG) dimensions of sustainability performance affect cost of equity, individually...

We investigate the effect of CFO narcissism, as measured by signature size, on financial reporting quality. Experimentally, we validate that narcissism predicts misreporting behavior, and that signature size predicts misreporting through its association with narcissism. Empirically, we examine...

This study examines the impact of the interactions of audit litigation and ownership structure on audit quality by Big 4 and non-Big 4 audit firms in Oman. This study uses modified audit opinion as proxies for audit quality, binary variable for audit litigation and percentage of shares owned by...