We investigate whether companies strategically change accounting estimates to manipulate earnings, as some claim (“opportunism” hypothesis), or whether these modifications represent changes in the underlying fundamentals of financially troubled or risky companies updating their priors about...

According to accounting and auditing standards, external auditors and management must both independently monitor goodwill balance for any impairment. Therefore, goodwill impairment may contain valuable incremental information about the CEO's ability which the board can utilize for CEO retention...

We study the effects of accounting losses on CEO turnover. If accounting losses provide incremental information about managerial ability, boards can utilize the information in losses to assess CEO's stewardship of assets, which is why losses may serve as a heuristic for managerial failure. We...