Litigation poses a significant business risk for auditors. We argue that auditors learn from other auditors' litigation events and examine the consequences of such events for future accounting misstatements. Using a hand-collected sample of auditor litigation events, we find a significant...

Using a measure of office-level industry concentration/specialization (as opposed to a market-based measure), we identify situations in which auditor industry specialization could be detrimental for audit outcomes. In stable environments, industry specialist auditors should be able to apply...

We find that lower ex-ante earnings volatility leads to higher Post-Earnings Announcement Drift (PEAD). PEAD is a function of both the magnitude of an earnings surprise and its persistence. While prior research has largely investigated market reactions to the magnitude of the earnings surprise,...

I find that the total asset (TA) growth anomaly (Cooper et al. 2008) is a noisy manifestation of the net operating asset (NOA) growth anomaly documented earlier in the accounting literature. To better understand the underlying causes of the growth anomalies, I decompose TA growth into NOA growth...

Section 404 of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX 2002) continues to be controversial. Using samples of SEC registrants with market capitalizations less than $150 million we find that, non-accelerated filers have significantly larger reduction in the likelihood of material misstatements, discretionary...