We find that firms with a top management counsel (TMC) have lower stock price crash risk than other firms. We further show that firms with a TMC issue more negative relative to positive earnings guidance and use more negative relative to positive words in their annual report filings, compared to...

We show that the returns of individual stocks become more synchronous with the aggregate market during periods of high investor sentiment. We also document that the effect of sentiment on stock return synchronicity is especially pronounced for small, young, volatile, non-dividend-paying and...

This study shows that auditors are more likely to charge higher audit fees, issue false-positive going concern opinions (i.e., Type I error), and resign from high asset redeployability (AR) firms. In supplemental tests, we use path analysis to show that the significant associations between AR...

Auditing standards and anecdotal evidence suggest that accounting personnel's lack of financial reporting competencies can increase audit risk. This study draws on human capital theory to measure the quality of accounting personnel based on their education level and obtains evidence of how the...

This study investigates whether a failed auditor suffers from reduced audit fees from clients who continue to employ him and whether the reduced audit fees are more pronounced when the failed auditor is not a market leader. The subject audit firm Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu (Deloitte), Hong Kong,...

We examine the association between financial statement comparability and the likelihood of accounting fraud. Prior research documents a negative association between the quality of a firm’s reporting environment and accounting fraud. We build on this literature and show that poor financial...

This study examines the effect of the passing of Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX) of 2002 as well as managerial entrenchment characteristics of corporations on the value-relevance of earnings. Our sample of observations is partitioned into three sub-periods: the Pre-Scandal (Pre-SCA) period, the Enron...

This paper extends the literature on the determinants of environment, social and governance (ESG) dimensions of sustainability investment by examining whether low growth firms with the agency problems of high free cash flows (FCF) (Jensen, 1986) have more incentives to invest in ESG...