additional tests, we document that religiosity greatly increases the information value of bank earnings, with both earnings …

affiliated with the bank's current audit firm. Overall, our results suggest that audit committee directors with professional …

. Using bank data from 21 African countries from 2002 to 2014, the results show that African banks audited by a Big 4 auditor …

We study whether bank managers' use their discretion in estimating the allowance for loan losses (ALL) for efficiency … or for opportunistic reasons. We do so by examining whether the use of this discretion relates to bank stability and bank … beating the prior year's earnings. Our results suggest that bank managers use their discretion over ALL for efficiency and not …

identify five reliable predictors of bank failure: auditor type, Tier 1 capital ratio, proportion of securitized loans, growth … in loans, and loan mix. For the larger full sample of banks, we identify ten predictors of bank failure: auditor type … loans, growth in real estate loans, growth in overall loans, loan mix, and whether the bank is a public bank …

provisions (low asset quality), and low capital (low balance sheet strength). We also find that auditor reputation (i.e., whether … the bank had a Big 4 auditor) had a moderating effect on the likelihood of bank failure and bank trouble for these banks …