This paper examines whether links between inside and outside directors have an impact on CEO compensation. Using a comprehensive sample of 22,074 directors for 3,114 firms, we develop a measure of the quot;back doorquot; distance between each pair of directors on a company's board. Specifically,...

We examine the relation between a broad set of corporate governance indicators and various measures of managerial decision making and organizational performance. Using a sample of 2,106 firms, we distill 39 structural measures of corporate governance (e.g., board characteristics, stock...

We examine the relation between the relative amount of fees paid to auditors for non-audit services and the behavior of accrual measures. We extend prior research in two important directions. First, using a pooled sample of 2,295 firms for the fiscal year 2000, we find very little evidence of a...

The empirical research examining the association between typical measures of corporate governance and various accounting and economic outcomes has not produced a consistent set of results. We believe that these mixed results are partially attributable to the difficulty in generating reliable and...

We examine the relation between the fees paid to auditors for audit and non-audit services and the choice of accrual measures for a large sample of firms. Using our pooled sample, we find that the ratio of non-audit fees to total fees has a positive relation with the absolute value of accruals...

Existing research indicates that firms with high accruals are more likely to experience future earnings problems, but that investors' expectations, as reflected in stock prices, do not appear to anticipate these problems. In this paper, we directly examine the published opinions of two types of...

Prior research has documented a "kink" in the earnings distribution: too few firms report small losses, too many firms report small profits. We investigate whether boosting of discretionary accruals to report a small profit is a reasonable explanation for this "kink". Overall, we are unable to...