Prior research suggests that Big 4 auditors provide higher quality audits by virtue of their large size. Still, the recent reforms mandated by the Sarbanes Oxley Act – by increasing client and auditor incentives for accurate reporting – may have narrowed audit quality differences across...

In this paper, we examine the relation between auditor litigation risk and abnormal accruals over the 1989-2007 time period. We address potential endogeneity in prior studies by jointly modeling abnormal accruals and litigation risk in a simultaneous equation system. Our findings suggest that...

We investigate whether the level of ownership by institutional shareholders with a long-term horizon is associated with firms’ tax avoidance activities. In theory, tax avoidance increases firm value through tax savings; however, institutions with long-term investment horizons are likely to...

Using 1990 through 2013 data of U.S. firms with foreign operations, we show that (1) the serial correlation of analyst forecast errors increases to the degree that firms diversify internationally, (2) post-earnings-announcement drift (PEAD) based on analyst forecast errors increases to the...

Exploiting the staggered enactment of country-level mergers and acquisitions (M&A) law as an exogenous increase in corporate takeover threat, this paper examines how a disciplinary market for corporate control affects accounting conservatism. Following M&A law adoption, we find increased...

We examine the causal effect of increased oversight by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) on the cost of bank loans issued to U.S. cross-listed foreign firms, using the signing of the Multilateral Memorandum of Understanding (MMoU) as a natural experiment. The MMoU enables the SEC...

This study investigates whether differences in accounting standards across countries inhibit firms from investing in foreign markets. Using the frequency and dollar magnitude of cross-border mergers and acquisitions (M&A) from 32 countries over the period 1998-2004, we find that the volume of...

Corporate financial transparency can affect labor markets directly by mitigating information asymmetries and optimizing the matching of heterogeneous firms and employees (matching efficiency channel) and indirectly through the effect of transparency on firms' capital inputs (capital utilization...

This study investigates whether differences in accounting standards across countries create information costs that inhibit firms from investing in foreign markets. Using the frequency and dollar magnitude of cross-border mergers and acquisitions (M&A) from 32 countries over the period 1998-2004,...