For much of the past decade, the audit profession has been enjoined to enter new and novel fields of assurance services. This call implies the importation of constructs from traditional attest financial audits into new domains to provide elevated levels of assurance for information-users and...

An analytic framework is provided for incorporating different user perspectives on materiality into the audit process. The framework serves as a tool for disaggregating materiality to specific accounts based on materiality criteria for accounts and account combinations. To improve audit...

In 2009, the SEC mandated that financial statements be filed using eXtensible Business Reporting Language (XBRL). The SEC contends that this new search-facilitating technology will reduce informational barriers that separate smaller, less-sophisticated investors from larger, more-sophisticated...

Investors have strong economic incentives to engage in unbiased information search in order to maximize the expected value of their investments. I examine whether an investor's psychological preference for information that supports his past investment decisions dominates his economic incentive...

Prior research indicates that audit and tax professionals' judgments are influenced by their client's preferences, both directly and indirectly (via information search). In an experiment with tax professionals as participants, we examine whether high practice risk (i.e., exposure to monetary and...

We test whether earnings management (like a virus) spreads from firm to firm via board connections of shared directors (virus carriers). We use earnings restatements to identify firms that managed earnings and to identify the period when these firms manipulated earnings. We consider firms as...

Practitioners and regulators are concerned that when auditors perceive management's attitude or character as indicative of low fraud risk, they are not sufficiently sensitive to high levels of incentive or opportunity risks in their overall fraud risk assessments. In this study, we examine...

We examine whether personality differences between the CEO and CFO influence audit fees. Audit fees should reflect engagement risk associated with a client. We use personality differences between the CEO and CFO as a proxy for potential poor communication, reluctance to share information, and...

Prior research provides evidence that financial-statement users weight information less heavily in judgment when that information is provided in a less accessible format (e.g., information disclosed in a footnote or less important financial statement rather than being recognized on the income...

Consider the following puzzle: If earnings management is harmful to shareholders, why don't they design contracts that induce managers to reveal the truth? To answer this question, we model the shareholders-manager relationship as a principal-agent game in which the agent (the manager) alone...