I study whether industry employment of active regulators weakens oversight. To examine this question, I exploit that the Financial Reporting Enforcement Panel (FREP), the German capital-market regulator responsible for enforcing public firms’ compliance with accounting standards, allows its...

We study the effect of financial incentives on whistleblowing and the consequences for whistleblowers under the cash-for-information program of the False Claims Act (FCA). Exploiting appeals-court decisions that increase financial incentives for whistleblowing, we find that greater incentives...

The new lease standard (ASC 842) allows firms to keep variable leases off-balance-sheet, on the assumption that future expenses cannot be estimated reliably. We show that variable-lease expenses are common and significant; they are as persistent and predictable as operating-lease expenses, and...

We study the effects of mood as a source of human bias on regulators’ oversight and enforcement decisions. We use weather at facilities at the time of an OSHA inspection to proxy for the OSHA compliance officers’ mood. We find that during periods of good mood due to sunny weather, the number...