I examine the association between politician ownership and accounting conservatism for a sample of S&P 1500 firms between 2005 and 2011. The contracting explanation predicts that politician owned firms adopt less conservative accounting because lenders are less concerned with downside default...

Recent research shows that matching between contemporaneous revenues and expenses has declined over the past 40 years. We argue that this decline in matching reduces the contracting usefulness of earnings and affects managerial effort allocation and performance measure choice. Based on a...

We examine the role of target firms' accounting quality in the merger and acquisition (M&A) process. We predict that target firm accounting quality will be positively associated with (1) the likelihood that the deal will be structured as a negotiation rather than as an auction; (2) the speed...