Using Amiram, Bozanic, and Rouen's (2015) measures of the conformity of a firm's distribution of financial statement line items' leading digits to the Benford distribution, we examine whether different constructs of audit quality inputs are related to financial statement reliability. Overall, we...

We hypothesize that the quality of market risk disclosure mandated by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission Financial Reporting Release No. 48 (FRR No. 48) provides useful information for assessing risk management effectiveness. Measuring risk disclosure quality as the degree of...

Using a sample of U.S. banks and indices for economic policy uncertainty and monetary policy uncertainty developed by Baker et al. (2016), we investigate whether these two sources of policy uncertainty affect bank earnings opacity. When economic and monetary policies are relatively uncertain, it...

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...

Masulis and Mobbs (2014, 2015) find that independent directors with multiple directorships allocate their monitoring effort unequally based on a directorship's relative prestige. We investigate whether bank loan contract terms reflect such unequal allocation of directors' monitoring effort. We...

Using an international sample of firms from 32 countries, we study the relation between media independence and corporate tax aggressiveness. We measure media independence by the extent of private ownership and competition in the media industry. Using an indicator variable for tax aggressiveness...

Despite the increased frequency of analyst forecasts during earnings announcements, empirical evidence on the interaction between the information in the earnings announcement and these forecasts is limited. We examine the implications of reinforcing and contradicting analyst forecast revisions...

We examine the relation between legal, extra-legal and political institutional factors and earnings quality of banks across countries. We predict that earnings quality is higher in countries with legal, extra-legal and political systems that reduce the consumption of private control benefits by...

We examine the unintended consequences of the 2005 increase in the asset threshold for FDICIA internal control reporting requirements from $500 million to $1 billion. We focus on a test sample of banks that grew from between $100 million to $500 million in assets prior to the change in...

We examine the ability of selected accounting and audit quality variables measured in a period prior to the financial crisis (i.e., the four quarters of 2006), to predict banks that subsequently failed during the financial crisis. These predictor variables include balance sheet strength, loan...