In 1914, an accounting professor named Arthur Andersen founded a public accounting practice that became the world’s largest professional-services firm. For years preceding the Enron debacle and Andersen’s collapse, the firm had struggled to create incentives within the organization for...

Two streams of agency theory research have focused on different aspects of the contracting relationship between shareholders and CEOs. The first stream of agency theory research examines the role of multiple performance measures in a CEOs compensation contract in maximizing firm value in a...

As critical components of infrastructure management systems, after enforcement of the Government Accounting Standards Boards statement 34 (GASB 34), development of a valuation approach and optimal rehabilitation and replacement polices (R&R policies) for infrastructure assets become overriding...

Managers have the ability to time the disclosure of the non-cash component of earnings, which, is termed accrual information, to outside investors. They have the choice of disclosing accrual information at the earnings announcement or waiting until the filing date. This thesis examines whether...

Performance pricing (PP) is a feature of loans that allows for dynamic changes in rates in response to changes in the credit risk of the borrower without the need for costly renegotiation or default. This provides management with an incentive to manipulate its accounting measures and the...

Prior studies fail to find that dedicated institutional investors (those characterized by long trading horizons and high ownership stakes in portfolio firms) trade in anticipation of future performance. In this study, I find that dedicated institutions sell shares of bankrupt firms at least one...

This study reexamines the evidence underlying the prior conclusion that investors overreact to accruals accruals are negatively associated with subsequent abnormal returns (i.e., the accrual anomaly). This study shows that the two features of the research design used to document the accrual...