Statement of Financial Accounting Standards Number 94 (FAS 94) requires that firms consolidate all majority-owned subsidiaries, including those that were previously exempt from consolidation requirements due to the dissimilarity of parents/subsidiary operations. Prior to FAS 94, firms disclosed...

We examine whether Canadian firms issuing convertible debt over the period 1996ndash;2003 structured issuances to minimize reported leverage. Over this sample period, some firms using payment-in-kind (PIK) provisions providing them with the option to make interest and/or principal payments in...

The stated goal of the 2011 SEC Whistleblower (WB) Program introduced as part of the Dodd-Frank Act was to strengthen investor protection through greater deterrence of securities law violations and more effective regulatory enforcement. While the SEC has articulated the success of the program...

We present a novel approach for measuring executive personality traits. Relying on recent developments in machine learning and artificial intelligence, we utilize the IBM Watson Personality Insights service to measure executive personalities based on CEOs' and CFOs' responses to questions raised...

The stated goal of the 2011 SEC Whistleblower (WB) Program introduced as part of the Dodd-Frank Act was to strengthen investor protection through greater deterrence of securities law violations and more effective regulatory enforcement. While the SEC has articulated the success of the program...

Demand for disclosures on environmental, social and governance (ESG) issues has increased dramatically. Using corporate political spending disclosures as our setting, we conduct a detailed inquiry of 541 political spending-related shareholder proposals from 2004 to 2012 to highlight the role of...

Compensation committees face special difficulties when setting pay in the last years of a CEO's tenure. For example, incentives to manipulate earnings for the purpose of enhancing earnings-based compensation are greater in CEOs' terminal years. We predict that compensation committees are aware...

Demand for disclosures on environmental, social and governance (ESG) issues has increased dramatically. Using corporate political spending disclosures as our setting, we conduct a detailed inquiry of 541 political spending-related shareholder proposals from 2004 to 2012 to highlight the role of...

Brown, Richardson and Schwager [1987] (BRS) find that the superior forecasting ability of analysts over time-series models is related to characteristics of a firm's information environment. This paper extends BRS by testing whether these characteristics are also related to analyst superiority as...