Using Chinese comment letters data, we investigate the impact of the disclosure of comment letters on the cost of debt financing. Empirical results show that when the comment letters are publicly disclosed, creditors charge borrowers significantly higher cost of debt financing. Furthermore, when...

Cost and expense stickiness is an important issue in accounting and economics research, and the literature has shown that cost stickiness cannot be separated from managers’ motivations. In this paper, we examine the effects that earnings management has on expense stickiness. Defining small...

This study investigates whether companies engage in audit opinion shopping activities by exerting influence over an audit firm's decision to switch the engagement partner (“partner-level opinion shopping”) in the Chinese setting, where the identities of engagement partners are publicly...

As an important reform of supervision, the comment letter mechanism adopted by the Shanghai Stock Exchange and the Shenzhen Stock Exchange has been paid much attention by regulators and academics. Taking Chinese A-share listed firms from 2015 to 2018 as our samples, this paper investigates the...

This article examines the effect of financial analysts’ knowledge structure on their forecast performance based on manually collected data of 1590 sell-side financial analysts’ education background. The longer the period of higher education in one major, the profounder the knowledge in a...

In recent years, the amount of goodwill has been increased dramatically and become one of the difficult problems in academic and accounting practice. This paper focuses on the impact of goodwill on analysts’ forecasts. It is found that goodwill can increase the optimism and decrease the...

This study examines the determinants of performance measurement tailoring between top management and middle managers in compensation contracts. Theoretically, while tailoring potentially enhances the informativeness of performance measures for top management and middle managers respectively, it...

The cost of equity capital (ICC) is a crucial component of investment decisions and corporate performance evaluations. This study explores the effect of a region's religious atmosphere on ICC and finds that ICC tends to be lower when stronger religious atmosphere is created. We further use the...

This study examines the effect of foreign investment on firms’ information quality. We use a unique setting—the Shanghai-Hong Kong Stock Connect Program in China—that provides an exogenous shock to foreign investment and allows global investors to trade on stocks that were previously...

Cost and expense stickiness is an important issue in accounting and economics research, and the literature has shown that cost stickiness cannot be separated from managers' motivations. In this paper, we examine the effects that earnings management has on expense stickiness. Defining small...