This paper investigates the costs, benefits and frequency of management earnings guidance issued by firms manipulating earnings. We find that, when manipulations are detected, misstating firms issuing guidance and their managers incur additional legal costs, as reflected in the higher settlement...

This paper examines the association between chief executive officers’ (CEOs’) prosocial tendency and their companies’ accounting information quality. We measure CEOs’ prosocial tendency using their involvement with charitable organizations. Our results suggest that prosocial CEOs are...

Thousands of publicly traded U.S. firms are exempt from auditor oversight of internal control effectiveness disclosures (Section 404(b) of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002). We provide initial estimates of the measurable benefits and costs of this exemption. We measure the benefit of exemption...

This study examines the effect of managers' career concerns on tax avoidance using the staggered recognition by state courts of the Inevitable Disclosure Doctrine (IDD), a trade secret protection doctrine which places greater restrictions on managers from joining or forming a rival company. We...

We construct a new, parsimonious, measure of disclosure quality — disaggregation quality (DQ) — and offer validation tests. DQ captures the level of disaggregation of accounting data through a count of nonmissing Compustat line items, and reflects the extent of details in firms' annual...