We document that the initiation of audit committee interlocks is associated with contagion in reported special items. We argue that this is, in part, attributable to contagion of accounting policy choices. We find that the special items of newly interlocked firms, unrelated before interlock,...

We investigate whether non-audit service (NAS) purchases are correlated among audit committee (AC) interlocked firms. We then examine whether financial reporting quality and future firm performance vary with the amount of correlated NAS purchases from the AC interlock. We find that firms in the...

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...