This report investigates whether the regulatory regime created by the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 (SOX) has driven firms in general, and small firms in particular, out of the public capital market. Previous attempts to address this question have had difficulty controlling for other factors that...

This article investigates whether the passage and the implementation of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 (SOX) drove firms out of the public capital market. To control for other factors affecting exit decisions, we examine the post-SOX change in the propensity of public American targets to be...

An extensive literature has analyzed the Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) legislation enacted in 2002, but its social welfare consequences remain controversial. One of the most significant provisions of SOX – auditor attestation of internal controls under Section 404(b) – has been applied only to firms...