We use changes in firm officers and external auditors to examine the relative influences of these parties on annual report textual disclosures. Using a sample of public companies that file XBRL-tagged financial statements with the SEC between 2011 and 2018, we find that changes in chief...

We expand the traditional specification of the tax gain from leverage by accounting for the choice between issuing debt and utilizing internal retained earnings equity. Standard analyses focus solely on the choice between debt and external equity. This results in the traditional tax gain from...

Several reforms of the Sarbanes Oxley Act were designed to strengthen the vigilance exercised by audit committee members in their oversight of independent financial-statement audits of U.S. public companies. After SOX, a shift occurred in the audit committee labor market such that more...

A restatement occurs when a previously issued financial statement contains a misstatement and this misstatement is detected and corrected. Higher audit quality lowers restatement probability by reducing misstatements, but it increases restatement probability by increasing the probability that...

Dividends often impose taxes on investors. However, as certain prior financial models indicate, they also can produce a tax gain from leverage. Hence the composite marginal dividend tax rate can be specified as the nominal rate minus the offsetting tax gain from leverage. Although this principle...

We argue that conflicting estimates of auditors' industry leadership premia documented in prior research reflect model misspecification. We show that leadership measures can be expected to identify different auditors as leaders depending on the basis (assets, fees or auditee counts) used to...