Conventional wisdom holds that joint audits would improve audit quality by enhancing audit evidence precision, because “Two heads are better than one,” and by enhancing auditor independence, because it is more expensive for a company to “bribe” two audit firms than one. Our paper...

This paper explores the effects of public information (e.g., accounting earnings) in a competitive lending setting where the borrower can engage in risk shifting. If a privately informed "inside" creditor bids against outsider creditors, public information levels the playing field with...

To restore investors' confidence in the reliability of corporate financial disclosures, the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 mandated stricter regulations and arguably increased auditors' liability. In this paper, we analyze the effects of increased auditor liability on the audit failure rate, the...

TThere has been debate over the economic consequences of accounting conservatism in debt contracting. We contribute to this debate by arguing that the prospect of signaling project return may give rise to the demand for conservative accounting, even though it may not improve contracting...

We consider a two-stage principal-agent screening environment in a decentralized supply chain with retailers, distributors, and a supplier. The retailers possess private information regarding their local market profitabilities. The distributors can partially observe the retailers'...

Global sourcing has made quality management a more challenging task, and supplier certification has emerged as a solution to overcome suppliers' informational advantage about their product quality. This paper analyzes the impact of certification standards on the supplier's investment in quality...

China first adopted minimum energy performance standards (MEPS) in 1989. Today, there are standards for a wide range of domestic, commercial and selected industrial equipment. In 1999, China launched a voluntary endorsement label, which has grown to cover over 40 products including water-saving...