I argue that external financial reporting quality has at best a 2nd order effect on firm value of U.S. publicly traded companies and that attempts to improve a firm's external reporting quality has a 3rd order effect on these firms' value. Recognizing that external financial reporting quality is...

Recently, South Africa has suffered from several large financial statement frauds. To assist stakeholders in identifying fraud, this study investigated the ability of the Beneish M-score and the Dechow et al. F-score to identify fraud in South Africa. The study also explored similarities in...

Background: This paper provides an overview of the literature in earnings management (EM), focusing on the last ten years of literature dealing with companies. Objectives: The paper's primary purpose is to determine whether there is still room for research in a field with extensive literature....

We examine the association between the existence and the magnitude of a fraudulent event that overstated earnings, non-fraudulent restatements of financial statements, and nine competing models of discretionary accruals, accrual estimation errors (Dechow and Dichev 2002 and McNichols 2002), and...

Recent theoretical and empirical studies suggest that blockholders (shareholders with ownership ≥ 5%) exert governance through the threat of exit. Blockholders have strong incentives to gather private information and sell their shares when managers are perceived to underperform. To prevent...

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...

This paper investigates whether U.S. regulatory actions around reverse mergers have exerted any spillover effects on the Chinese firms listed in China and whether Chinese firms have exhibited lower financial reporting quality than their U.S. counterparts. To test the possible spillover effect,...

Empirical research from the first years following SOX suggests that firms improve accruals quality following restatements, but both the number and materiality of restatements have declined since then. This decline may affect firms' responses to restatements and hence we re-examine whether...

Prior literature is mixed as to whether smoothing through accruals indicates higher or lower financial reporting quality (Tucker and Zarowin 2006; Jayaraman 2008; Dechow et al. 2010). Motivated by the unique inter-temporal features and reporting incentives of tax expense, we provide new evidence on this...

Financial statements represent an instrument by which relevant information about a company is passed on to its users. Based on the information presented in the financial statements, i.e. information on the financial position and performance of the company, and generated cash flows and capital,...