We provide evidence that outside directors’ trading and ratification decisions are incrementally useful in assessing their independence. Because crises test the independence of boards, we first investigate the CEO replacement decision in firms caught intentionally misreporting earnings. We...

We analyze a sample of 330 firms making unaudited disclosures required by Section 302 and 383 firms making audited disclosures required by Section 404 of the Sarbanes - Oxley Act. We find that Section 302 disclosures are associated with negative announcement abnormal returns of -1.8 percent, and...

We rely on the theoretical prediction that financial misreporting peaks before economic busts to examine whether aggregate ex ante measures of the likelihood of financial misreporting improve the predictability of U.S. recessions. We consider six measures of misreporting and show that the...

An accounting-based model has strong out-of-sample power not only to detect fraud, but also to predict cross-sectional returns. Firms with a higher probability of manipulation (MSCORE) earn lower returns in every decile portfolio sorted by: Size, Book-to-Market, Momentum, Accruals, and...

An earnings manipulation detection model based on forensic accounting principles (Beneish 1999) has substantial out-of-sample ability to predict cross-sectional returns. We show that the model correctly identified, ahead of time, 12 of the 17 highest profile fraud cases in the period 1998-2002....

This study investigates whether a shock to financial reporting has a differential impact on debt and equity markets. Using macroeconomic data and a pre-post design centered in 2005, we find that IFRS adoption has a significantly greater effect on foreign debt than on foreign equity investment...