Prior studies have theoretically and empirically documented that incentives to disclose information involve a trade-off between the benefits to the corporation of reducing information asymmetry and the costs of revealing proprietary information. This study investigates the interplay of managers'...

This study attempts to provide a comprehensive understanding of the interrelationships among chief financial officers' (CFOs') professional qualifications, SOX Section 404 internal control weakness, CFOs' turnover, CFOs' qualification improvement, and correction of material weaknesses. We find...

Most earnings restatements are blamed on error, or misunderstanding of GAAP, but suspicion persists that many of these restatements are instead due to intentional earnings management. We analyze balance sheet bloat, or unusually high levels of working capital account balances, for evidence of...

We examine whether Basu's (1997) differential timeliness metric and the related C-Score metric are effective in detecting predictable differences in conservatism surrounding corrections of overstated earnings. Cross-sectional and time-series analyses, employing 2132 firms making restatements...

This study investigates the association of audit fee pressure with an inverse measure of audit quality, misstatements in audited data, during the recent recession. Fee pressure in a year is measured as the difference between benchmark “normal” audit fees and actual audit fees. We find fee...

Much of the agency literature assumes that various monitoring devices are partial substitutes in reducing total agency costs. In particular, internal and external auditing often are characterized as monitoring devices that should be partial substitutes. We argue that reliable evidence of this...