Rating agencies are expected to be concerned about their long-term reputation because if they lose the trust of investors their ratings would lose credibility and value. We expect that there is less effective monitoring and hence more opportunities for ratings shopping within speculative grades...

We build a Kyle-type pricing model with earnings and trading signals and estimate its deep parameters - the information advantages of traders and firms, the correlation between the firm and traders' information, and the noise variance. Moment conditions derived from the pricing rule yield a...

Purpose – The paper aims to examine the relation between fees paid to auditors and audit quality during the period of 2000‐2003. Design/methodology/approach – The paper constructs a measure of auditor profitability that is used as a proxy for auditor independence. The methodology is...

Purpose – Recent US reforms aimed at strengthening audit committees and their structure grant independent audit committees the responsibility to appoint, dismiss, and compensate auditors. The purpose of this paper is to examine the association between audit committee characteristics and...

This paper extends prior research on audit risk adjustment by examining the association of audit pricing with internal control problems disclosed under Sections 404 and 302 of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act. While studies of auditors' responses to internal control risk provide mixed evidence, it is...

Recent US reforms aimed at strengthening audit committees and their structure assign independent audit committees the responsibility to appoint, dismiss, and compensate auditors. We examine the association between audit committee characteristics and auditors' compensation and dismissals...

We examine whether chief financial officers (CFOs) with accounting backgrounds (accountant CFOs) are associated with more conservative corporate outcomes. We find that, in high-growth industries, firms with accountant CFOs invest less in research and development and capital expenditures and are...

We examine whether shareholder votes can influence the audit committee and whether this influence is uniform across non-staggered and staggered boards. We find that through voting, shareholders can increase the efficacy of the audit committee, leading to improvements in audit committee...