We view audit‐quality choice as one among many that managers make to maximize firm value. We question whether audit‐quality differences among publicly traded companies are of significant interest to investors, clients, and auditors and ask for research on this topic. Relatedly, we ask for...

We study whether the sealing of a defendant's judicial records during a patent lawsuit filing correlates with the defendant's level of competition and disclosure. Courts permit sealing of judicial records when competitive damage outweighs the public interest in access to documents and records....

We examine whether support vector regressions (SVR), supervised LDA (sLDA), random forest regression trees (RF), and ‘tone' extract narrative content from conference calls that correlates with useful information that a human reader would identify. We find that each narrative-content measure...

We examine firms’ behavior around the adoption of SFAS 160 to provide evidence on the costs and benefits associated with mandated accounting changes. The reclassification of minority interest to equity mandated by SFAS 160 can result in a wealth transfer from bondholders to stockholders....

We use MD&A disclosures to predict current-year firm-level accruals using support-vector regressions. We call these predictions big-data accruals. Our aim is to measure the explanatory power of MD&A disclosures for liquidity and critical accounting choices. We find that big-data accruals explain...

This paper constructs a manager sentiment index based on the aggregated textual tone of corporate financial disclosures. We find that manager sentiment is a strong negative predictor of future aggregate stock market returns, with monthly in-sample and out-of-sample R2 of 9.75% and 8.38%,...

We examine the relation between bank holdings of mortgage-backed securities (MBS) and MBS prices. Theory suggests feedback between MBS holdings and underlying asset markets can be aggravated by mark-to-market accounting. We measure feedback by the relation between asset returns and the changes...

We examine the relation between accounting conservatism and creditor recovery rates for firms in default. We also test the link between conservatism and the length of distress resolution proceedings. We find creditors of firms with more conservative accounting prior to default have significantly...

Using novel receivable-based-loan data, we study the effect of aging-report loan covenants on borrowers' accounts receivable reporting quality. Our purpose is to highlight a channel that lenders use to obtain private information and to understand whether lenders' information acquisition affects...