While prior research suggests strict, fair-value-based securities accounting rules cause banks to sell securities into negative liquidity shocks, a value-destroying behavior called "liquidity feedback trading," the mechanism is uncertain. We find the sooner CEOs are permitted to sell their...

Recent accounting scandals have resulted in regulatory initiatives designed to strengthen audit committee oversight of corporate financial reporting and have led to a concern that U.S. GAAP has become too rules-based. We examine issues related to these initiatives using two experiments. CFOs in...

There is a high level of interest in the relative merit of principles based standards versus rules based standards. At the heart of the debate appears to be the level of discretion available to managers under the alternative approaches, the consequence of which is perceived to be earnings...

We predict and find that regulations expected to harmonize and strengthen firms' financial reporting in the European Union (EU) in the early 2000s increase Tobin's Q ratios of firms with high agency costs due to (a) concentration of control (entrenchment) and (b) an excess of the largest...

We examine the effect of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX) on the extent of aggressive/conservative reporting behavior of public companies. SOX imposes considerably greater potential penalties on CEO/CFOs who engage in financial wrongdoing; therefore, risk averse managers are likely to report lower...

This study examines the association between CFOs' equity incentives and earnings management. CEOs' equity incentives have been shown to be associated with accruals management, beating earnings benchmarks, and earnings restatements (Bergstresser and Philippon, 2006; Cheng and Warfield, 2005; McAnally et...

One of the goals of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (hereafter SOX) was to restore confidence in financial reporting by providing incentive for firms to report financial results that reflect the underlying economic performance. Early findings are inconclusive on the success of the Act. Cohen, Dey and Lys...

Using publicly available data from annual reports, we find that SEC rule changes (33-8128 and 33-8644) that impose time pressure on the audits of registered firms have a negative impact on earnings quality, which we interpret as evidence of lower audit quality. Consistent with our predictions,...

In this paper we argue that information asymmetry between firm insiders and outside equity investors generates conservatism in financial statements. Conservatism reduces the manager's incentives and ability to manipulate accounting numbers and so reduces information asymmetry and the deadweight...

This paper is Part II in a two part series on conservatism in accounting. Part I examines alternative explanations for conservatism in accounting and their implications for accounting regulators (SEC and FASB). Part II summarizes the empirical evidence on the existence of conservatism,...