PurposeThe Securities and Exchange Commission reviews public companies' filings and sometimes issue comment letters (CL) to the company in response. Such correspondence from the SEC may cause the committee to reevaluate their auditors' expertise or performance which could prompt an auditor...

Concerns are commonly raised that strong public unions extract generous pension benefits from state governments and are the cause of states' burdensome pension obligations. Prior research (Anzia and Moe 2015) finds evidence supporting such concerns. Consistent with incentives to minimize such...

This study examines whether having accounting experts on audit committees can mitigate the upward bias of expected rates of return (ERR) on pension plan assets documented in prior research. ERRs are found to be lower in firms with accounting expertise on their audit committees. These results are...

We investigate whether quarterly annual effective tax rate (ETR) estimates are systematically biased in comparison to year-end actual ETRs. We find that estimated annual ETRs in the first, second, and third quarters are systematically higher than year-end ETRs. We then investigate whether...