In this study, we examine whether government regulatory initiatives in China involving IPO by SOEs may have contributed to opportunistic behaviors by the issuer. We focus on two sets of IPO regulations issued between January 1, 1996 and February 11, 1999: pricing regulations, which stipulate...

Based on a model developed in prior studies (e.g. Ogneva et al. 2007), we first use US data to predict the likelihood that a firm has material internal control weaknesses (ICW). We then show, using this model, that firms in the pre-SOX era, in UK and in Australia with a higher predicted...

When we examine all firms in the sample we find that short-term debt is positively associated with earnings management consistent with some prior studies and the debt hypothesis. However, when we focus on high creditworthy (investment grade) firms we find a negative relation between short-term...

Psychological and upper echelons theories suggest that CEOs with the personality trait of sensation seeking shape corporate policies. In gauging sensation seeking with whether the CEO holds a pilot license, we examine its importance to firms' accounting conservatism. Our evidence implies that...

Theory suggests that financial-report-based debt covenants engender incentives for the manager to relax covenant constraints through accounting choices in order to avoid costly covenant violations. Prior studies directly testing this hypothesis in the context of financial misreporting fail to...

Capitalizing on a quasi-natural experiment in China where some firms become investible to the global market across different times (i.e., pilot firms), we explore the role that stock market liberalization plays in shaping firms' financial reporting practices. In one direction, market...

Theory suggests that financial-report-based debt covenants engender incentives for the manager to relax covenant constraints through accounting choices in order to avoid costly covenant violations. Prior studies directly testing this hypothesis in the context of financial misreporting fail to...