We investigate the impact of the initiations of national audit inspection programs on firm-specific stock crash risk in 38 countries worldwide. The staggered commencement of the inspection regimes in different countries allows us to identify the causal effect of audit quality on crash risk. We...

While prior research holds the consensus that accounting conservatism can serve as an effective monitoring device, it is not clear whether shareholders can successfully enforce managers' adherence to accounting conservatism when directors fail to fulfill their fiduciary duties. We attempt to...

Using a large panel of more than 140,000 state-owned enterprises (SOEs), this study examines SOEs' investment behavior surrounding 82 national elections in 25 European countries between 2001 and 2015. We find that SOEs increase their corporate investment by about 29% of the sample average during...

We examine whether changes to corporate governance arising from board reforms affect corporate tax behavior. While the relation between corporate governance and tax behavior has been the subject of intense interest in the literature, prior research has been hampered by a lack of exogenous...