This paper examines whether firms manipulating their reported financial results make suboptimal investment decisions. We examine fixed asset investments for a large sample of public companies during the 1978-2002 period and document that firms that manipulate their earnings - firms investigated...

We track the fortunes of all 2,206 individuals identified as responsible parties for all 788 SEC and Department of Justice enforcement actions for financial misrepresentation from 1978 through September 30, 2006. Fully 93% lose their jobs by the end of the regulatory enforcement period. A...

This study investigates whether a firm's corporate governance practices have an effect on the quality of its publicly released financial information. In particular, we examine the relationship between audit committee and board of directors characteristics and the extent of corporate earnings...

This study investigates the association between bias in earnings forecasts released by managers of financially distressed firms and subsequent insider trading. Prior studies have documented optimism in such forecasts. Given this finding, this study investigates whether this optimism is...

This study examines whether outside directors factor in litigation costs for the firm while monitoring optimal disclosure policy. It investigates the association of management earnings forecast disclosure and the proportion of outside directors across two regimes with unequal litigation costs -...

This study examines whether audit committee and board characteristics are related to earnings management by the firm. A negative relation is found between audit committee independence and abnormal accruals. A negative relation is also found between board independence and abnormal accruals....

This paper reviews the background, practice, core problems, effectiveness and prospects of corporate governance in Hong Kong. Areas discussed include the standard and core problems, legal and regulatory framework, owner-directors and conflicts with minority shareholders, directors' duties and...

The European Union (EU) has been debating for several years whether to change from the legal capital regime as regulated under the Second Company Law Directive to a solvency test regime as applied in the US, for example. Based on an analysis of direct compliance costs and capital maintenance...

We investigate the comparability of accounting earnings for 14 EU countries in the period 1990-2005. Although prior studies have documented international differences in financial reporting properties, there is hardly any large-scale international evidence on the underlying fundamentals driving...

This paper examines how capital market pressures and institutional factors shape firms' incentives to report earnings that reflect economic performance. To isolate the effects of reporting incentives, we exploit the fact that, within the European Union, privately held corporations face the same...