One of the goals of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (hereafter SOX) was to restore confidence in financial reporting by providing incentive for firms to report financial results that reflect the underlying economic performance. Early findings are inconclusive on the success of the Act. Cohen, Dey and Lys...

Prior research finds that donors reward nonprofits that report larger program ratios with more donations and that managers overstate these ratios, ostensibly to attract donations. We examine how donors react to inflated ratios. We find that the average donor discounts ratios that are inflated by...

This study investigates whether opportunistic earnings management affects the value relevance of net income and book value in determining stock price. We document a decrease in the value relevance of earnings in the year of an equity offering for a group of firms that exhibit ex post evidence of...

This paper examines how the characteristics of accounting systems and management incentives interact and collectively determine financial reporting quality. We develop a rational expectations equilibrium model that features a steady-state firm with investments, financial and non-financial...

We examine whether the complexity of mandatory accounting disclosures prompts managers to voluntarily disclose adjusted measures of actual earnings performance. We also explore whether this disclosure practice reflects attempts to obfuscate or to mitigate informational problems arising from...

A premise of standard setters and of much empirical research is that improving the quality of accounting standards and their implementation increases information in capital markets. This paper challenges this premise and shows that there are situations in which “better”, i.e., more...

The purpose of this paper is to examine the effect of the adoption of converged to IFRS national standards on accounting conservatism (AC) and to investigate the effect of corporate governance (CG) attributes (government ownership, management ownership, concentration of ownership, board size,...

The U.S. Congress passage of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 (SOX) was a direct response to the accounting scandals of the 1990s and an attempt to reform the financial/business reporting process. Due to corporate malfeasance in the United States since the mid 1990s, there has been a significant...