Corporate governance has received an increasing amount of attention in recent years. Corporate scandals have brought corporate governance weaknesses to the attention of the general public, especially in the United States. But corporate governance is sometimes a problem in other countries as...

Recent research asserts that an essential feature of good corporate governance is strong investor protection, where investor protection is defined as both (1) the extent of the laws that protect investors' rights and (2) the strength of the legal institutions that facilitate law enforcement. The...

In this paper we determine the strategic exercise of an IPO option in a framework of asymmetric information. Private owners are exposed to the idiosyncratic risk of the firm while public investors are not fully informed about the type of the firm. Idiosyncratic risk creates an incentive for...

There is a growing analytical body of research on artificial smoothing - the manipulation of accounting numbers through accounting cosmetics. However, firms also can manipulate earnings through production-investment decisions real smoothing; the latter topic received little attention. In this...

This study provides evidence on the characteristics associated with the completeness of corporate tax reporting by firms subject to the AMT. We find disclosure of tax status is contingent upon the potential costs and benefits of the disclosure. In particular, the variables that are significant...

This paper investigates the motivations for managers' decisions to overstate earnings and examines the consequences of such decisions. We examine firms subject to enforcement actions by the Securities and Exchange Commission for having violated the financial reporting requirements of the...

Purpose – This paper aims to examine the relationship between corporate governance, corruption and disclosure of forward-looking information in listed firms in two African countries, Botswana and Ghana.Design/methodology/approach – The study uses 174 firm-year observations between the period...

We investigate the relation between audit committee (AC, hereafter) quality indices derived from a principal component analysis (PCA) and firm value using a sample of 12,301 firms over the period 2002 to 2012. We also examine the usefulness of the indices in predicting the quality of a firm's...

This study evaluates the effects of the audit committee and the fiscal council with their different characteristics on earnings quality in Brazil. The proxies of earnings quality used are: relevance of accounting information, timeliness, and conditional conservatism. The sample consists of...

Private firms face differing financial disclosure and auditing regulations around the world. In the United States and Canada, for example, private firms are generally neither required to disclose their financial results nor have their financial statements audited. By contrast, many firms with...