The purpose of this study is to determine whether the composition of a company’s audit committee affects decisions by retail (non-institutional) investors. We examine if these investors’ confidence in reported earnings is affected by the number of committee experts under the U. S. Securities...

Cohen et al. (2008) document that firms switched from accrual-based earnings management (AEM) to real earnings management (REM) within three years after passage of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX) in 2002. A remaining question is how so many firms could have made the transition from one accounting...

Purpose – Since the 1960s earnings management has been a widely researched area and became presumably known by the current accounting scandals. This paper aims at empirically showing which factors affect earnings management.Design/methodology/approach – According to former research...

We examine why US-listed foreign companies choose to have a US-based (rather than home country-based) Big N firm as their principal auditor for SEC reporting purposes and the effects of that choice for audit fees and earnings quality. We find that the likelihood of the Big N principal auditor...

This study investigates whether workload pressures, as proxied by the audit busy season (i.e., December fiscal year-end date) and auditor workload compression (i.e., relative concentration of companies with the same fiscal year-end date in an auditor's client portfolio), affect audit quality....

Many existing earnings management studies establish earnings management detection criteria by examining the statements of every organization under review for a significant period of time. While being suitable for the academia, this approach cannot be adopted by the practitioners, who do not have...

This study examines the behaviour of earnings, accruals and impairment losses of failed finance companies in New Zealand. It draws on conservatism in the development of research hypotheses about accounting variables that are likely to contain clues to future failures of finance companies. The...

Theory from organizations and economics research posits that in an inter-organizational relationship, both parties invest in relationship-specific knowledge, which in turn facilitates the effectiveness of the relationship while strengthening the attachment between the parties. In complex...

Using publicly available data from annual reports, we find that SEC rule changes (33-8128 and 33-8644) that impose time pressure on the audits of registered firms have a negative impact on earnings quality, which we interpret as evidence of lower audit quality. Consistent with our predictions,...

We show that firms ‘in danger' of being delisted from a stock market (NASDAQ) report higher performance-adjusted discretionary accruals and the inflated accruals are associated with an increased likelihood of maintained listing. Accruals of firms ‘in danger' are less positive in fiscal...