We provide evidence on the effect of political connections on the trade-off between real and accrual-based earnings management in the United States. This evidence is important because prior literature documents mixed evidence on whether political connections reduce the threat of SEC enforcement....

Watts (2003), among others, argues that conservatism helps in corporate governance by mitigating agency problems associated with managers' investment decisions. We hypothesize that if conservatism reduces managers' ex ante incentives to take on negative NPV projects and improves the ex post...

Research on the association between abnormal audit fees (measuring audit effort) and financial misconduct has produced mixed results. The use of actual misstatements in this research creates small-sample inferences, introduces systematic selection bias, and reduces the scope of sample coverage....

Sarbanes Oxley Act (SOX) Section 407 requires firms to disclose if there is a financial expert serving on their audit committees. The extant literature has largely documented SOX 407 benefits, ranging from controlling earning management to reducing internal control weaknesses. Our paper...

Standard setters have expressed concern over the impact of complex accounting standards on the information gap between firm insiders and financial statement users. We address this issue by examining the relationship between accounting reporting complexity (ARC) and the market response to...