We develop an economic theory on the endogenous relationship between corporate disclosure and shareholder litigation and derive three key results. (i) Decreasing litigation risk can lead to more or less disclosure due a trade-off between the deterrence and the insurance effects of litigation....

This paper surveys both the theoretical and the empirical archival literature on conservatism when accounting information is used for debt contracting. The theoretical literature shows mixed results whether conservative accounting is desirable, which depends on the underlying agency problem, the...

To protect investors, regulators increasingly rely on regulating firms' internal controls over financial reporting, but they punish noncompliance only if an internal control weakness enabled accounting manipulation. In other words, enforcement is manipulation-contingent. We develop an economic...

This paper studies strategic interactions between public and private enforcement of accounting regulation and their consequences for the deterrence of financial misreporting. We develop an economic model with a manager, a public enforcement agency, and an investor and derive equilibrium...

A premise of standard setters and of much empirical research is that improving the quality of accounting standards and their implementation increases information in capital markets. This paper challenges this premise and shows that there are situations in which “better”, i.e., more...

The paper considers two major economic effects created by the Internet for financial accounting and disclosure. First, the Internet changes the costs of information processes and with it the demand and supply of financial information in capital markets. Second, Internet financial reporting...

Empirical studies on earnings quality use various measures that capture particular dimensions of earnings quality. This paper provides a theoretical foundation to evaluate and compare several common earnings quality measures: value relevance, persistence, predictability, smoothness, and...