Some corporations attempt to lessen their tax burden through active involvement in the legislative process. We identify firms that contributed to congressional candidates who favor reductions in the U.S. corporate statutory tax rate. This support created a temporary incentive to manage effective...

Motivated by recent high-profile instances of policy uncertainty in the U.S., this study examines whether policy uncertainty affects the forecasting performance of financial analysts. We conjecture that policy uncertainty increases the complexity of the forecasting task for analysts, resulting...

I examine the association between politician ownership and accounting conservatism for a sample of S&P 1500 firms between 2005 and 2011. The contracting explanation predicts that politician owned firms adopt less conservative accounting because lenders are less concerned with downside default...

The media can impose reputational costs on firms because of its important role as an information intermediary and its ability to negatively slant coverage. We exploit a quasi-natural experiment that holds constant the information event across firms, but varies the availability of a major news...

Demand for disclosures on environmental, social and governance (ESG) issues has increased dramatically. Using corporate political spending disclosures as our setting, we conduct a detailed inquiry of 541 political spending-related shareholder proposals from 2004 to 2012 to highlight the role of...

We evaluate the net costs and benefits of the whistleblower (WB) provisions adopted under the Dodd-Frank Reform Act of 2010 by examining investor responses to events related to the proposed regulations. We focus our main analysis on a sample of firms that lobbied against implementation of the WB...

Advances in auditing technology and PCAOB reports documenting deficiencies by public accounting firms have increased recent dialog about what constitutes sufficient audit evidence, particularly given that the determination of sufficiency depends largely on professional judgment. We analyze...

The process of accounting policy-making is addressed within an important and evolving body of literature. This paper adds to that literature in explaining the contemporary phase of transnational accounting policy-making through efforts by the FASB and IASB to construct a set of standards...

This paper adds to the literature on accounting change in explaining a decade-long effort by the FASB and IASB to develop a set of global accounting standards accepted by markets worldwide. This research studies the effort as one of “convergence” in accounting standards and aims to bring...

This study aims to understand how and to what extent non-Big 4 assurance professionals incorporated technologies into assurance engagements during the COVID-19 pandemic. We conduct a field study interviewing 30 assurance professionals in regional/national (i.e., non-Big 4) firms in the US....