This paper examines how constraints on firms' financing capacity relate to managers' discretionary accounting choices. Three hypotheses of earnings management — the opportunism hypothesis, the rational expectations hypothesis, and the signaling hypothesis — predict that constrained firms...

The value relevance of financial statements is of great significance to investors and standard setters. The present research examines whether accounting comparability among industry peers enhances the value relevance of earnings and book value. This is an important question because both the...

We propose a new input-based measure of financial statement comparability (FSC) that captures the degree of overlap in the financial statement line items reported by industry peers. FSC quantifies the extent to which peer firms have similar economic events and accounting transactions as...

Changes in firms’ warranty payments are informative signals that enable investors to form timely expectations about potential changes in product quality. The authors’ survey shows that warranty payments affect potential investors’ product quality assessments and stock investment...

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to test the association between various stakeholder groups and whether nonprofit organizations (NPOs) have obtained accountability accreditation. In particular, the study intends to answer the following research questions: Does the governance of an NPO have...

Purpose: Using a sample of US nonprofit organizations, where the identity of the auditor in charge of the audit is revealed, I investigate whether individual auditor characteristics (gender, engagement size and tenure) are associated with audit quality. Design/methodology/approach: To...

Purpose: In addressing policy problems, it is difficult to disentangle public policies from private efforts, business institutions and civic activities. Societies may acknowledge that all these domains have a role in accomplishing social aims, but there are fundamental problems in understanding...