I discuss Minnis (2011) in the context of the broader literature on private firm financing. In particular, I focus on the unique features of the private firm setting and how it affects research design and inference. I detail the alternative information sources available to debt financiers of...

An underlying objective of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act is to provide investors with reliable information, which presumably should increases investor confidence in financial disclosures. In part to achieve this goal, managers now have personal legal liability for internal control over financial...

This study uses a unique institutional setting in China to investigate empirically the association between the organizational form of CPA firms (unlimited liability versus limited liability) and the reporting conservatism of auditors. Based on a sample of 5,007 audits of Chinese listed companies...

I examine how verification of financial statements influences debt pricing. I use a large proprietary database of privately-held U.S. firms, an important business sector in which the information environment is opaque and financial statement audits are not mandated. I find that audited firms have...

I discuss Minnis [2010] in the context of the broader literature on private firm financing. In particular, I focus on the unique features of the private firm setting and how it affects research design and inference. I detail the alternative information sources available to debt financiers of...

Audit quality is a much studied issue. Recently, various auditing researchers have looked at the idea that audit quality may be systematically related to the auditor being male or female. Although this seams a genuine research question, the approach adopted by these researchers (incorporating...

This paper studies the effect of tax advice expenses and the auditor on the effective tax rate for large Belgian firms. Moreover, we analyze how this relation changes when the corporate governance code was implemented in 2003. Following the Sarbanes Oxley Act of 2002, Belgium approved a similar...

Serafeim [2011] examines the determinants and economic consequences of embedded value (EV) reporting, a voluntary disclosure arrangement in the life insurance industry. He finds substantial reductions in bid-ask spreads for EV reporting firms, and links the occurrence of this disclosure practice...

While risk reporting disclosures have been required in Germany since 1999, equal requirements have become mandatory in Austria and all member states of the European Union only since 2005. The analysis conducted includes the risk reporting disclosures of all non-financial companies listed in the...

In this study we investigate the association between audit quality and information asymmetry between informed and uninformed traders. We employ three proxies for information asymmetry - absolute price differences, absolute volatility differences, and absolute differences in the long/short ratio...