While the shareholder benefits of audits are well documented, evidence on whether audits can facilitate opportunistic behavior by corporate insiders is scarce. In this paper, we examine whether the audit process facilitates one particular form of opportunism: informed trading by corporate...

Decentralized finance (DeFi) represents a large capital market where users conduct transactions primarily through digital smart contracts. These contracts are susceptible to cyber-attacks and coding errors that can result in significant financial losses, which has led to the emergence of smart...

We explore the landscape of public company auditing around the introduction of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) in 1934. Using a broad sample of historical annual reports spanning several decades, we document that most public companies obtained audits even before the SEC’s audit...