Section 404 of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX) requires every company to report on the effectiveness of internal controls over financial reporting. Section 404 has arguably been the most controversial provision of SOX, with many registrants complaining that the high cost of compliance outweighs its...

We study the impact of derivatives on stock characteristics such as valuation, price efficiency, and liquidity. We resolve the endogeneity issue faced in the extant literature by using an order issued by the Indian market regulator that resulted in delisting of 51 stocks from the derivative...

We find a model that uses both financial statement and market information is an unambiguously superior predictor of bankruptcy than the going concern (audit) opinion. However, the audit opinion has incremental predictive ability for bankruptcy beyond both financial statement and market-based...

We examine whether firms that frequently issue quarterly earnings guidance behave myopically, where myopic behavior is defined as sacrificing long-term growth for the purpose of meeting short-term goals (Porter [1992]). We find that dedicated guiders invest significantly less in research and...

We examine the effect of Regulation FD on stock return volatility. Critics suggest FD has increased volatility by causing firms to (a) disclose less information, resulting in increased noise trading and pricing errors; or (b) substitute essentially continuous communication to the market through...

We examine whether Regulation FD is associated with changes in the information environment prior to earnings announcements. After implementation of Regulation FD we find (a) lower return volatility around earnings announcements; (b) some improvement in the speed with which pre earnings...

We examine the effect of lending banks' board representation (affiliated banker on board, or AFB) on conservative accounting. We argue that private information obtained through board representation enhances the monitoring and the influence of lenders and therefore reduces their demand for...

We use computer-intensive techniques to study the informational properties of forward-looking disclosures in the MD&A sections of 10-K filings made with the SEC. We find that firms make more forward-looking MD&A disclosures when their stock prices have lower informational efficiency, i.e., when...

This paper introduces a new measure of a firm's exposure to systematic distress risk--the probability of a recession at the time of a firm's failure. For stocks in the top quintile of the probability of failure, a median hedge portfolio based on our measure generates a positive risk premium of...

Recent research attributes the decline in the labor share to a change from expensing to capitalizing intellectual property in the national income accounting, raising a possibility that the labor share decline is a measurement artifact. We find that these results are limited to the labor share of...