This study examines the impact of auditor quality on debt covenants. We conjecture that high-quality auditors have two related effects on debt covenants: (i) they encourage fewer and less restrictive covenants by providing assurance to lenders at contract inception and, consequently, (ii) they...

This study examines the impact of CEO inside debt on earnings management. Theory predicts that CEOs with higher inside debt holdings adopt less risky corporate policies and choose investment policies that result in less volatile earnings. Under such circumstances, CEOs would face weaker demand...

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...

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...

Accounting scandals are becoming perpetual in nature. They range from the ancient Mesopotamia, to the South Sea Bubble of 1720, to the famous Enron of 2001, down to Parmalat, Tesco and Toshiba of today. The series of accounting scandals that have occurred in the last two decades calls for a...

The purpose of public company audits is to increase the integrity of firms' financial statements. However, research provides mixed evidence on whether better auditors mitigate misstatement risk embedded in the financial reporting process. A challenge in previous studies is the lack of a powerful...

We investigate the association between joint audit and cost of debt for a sample of non-financial, publicly listed firms from the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries. Although the conventional wisdom suggests that “two heads are better than one”, empirical evidence on the beneficial...

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...

The ownership structures of Western European firms engender agency conflicts between: (i) owners and managers (type I); and (ii) minority and controlling shareholders (type II). Prior research stresses that credible financial reporting ameliorates agency problems by identifying any diversion of...

Several studies document a robust negative association between net external financing and average stock returns, which is referred to as the external financing effect. Using total asset growth as a comprehensive measure of overall corporate investment and total profitability gross of Ramp;D...