This study investigates the hitherto unexplored questions of whether and how a material weakness in internal control over financial reporting (ICW) and its disclosure influence the occurrence of extreme negative outliers in stock return distributions, which we refer to as stock price crash risk....

We investigate the association between material weakness in internal controls (MW) disclosed under Section 302 of SOX and future stock price crash risk. We argue that relative to firms with effective internal controls, firms with MW have lower financial reporting precision. The lower reporting...