This study examines how firm- and country-level governance mechanisms affect the role of industry competition in influencing managerial incentives. Specifically, we examine how concentrated ownership structures and legal institutions affect the positive association between industry competition...

Speakers of strong future time reference (FTR) languages (e.g., English) are required to grammatically distinguish between future and present events, while speakers of weak-FTR languages (e.g., Chinese) are not. We hypothesize that speaking about the future in the present tense may result in the...

We posit that a change in analyst interest in a firm is an early indicator of the firm's future fundamentals, capital market activities, and stock returns. We measure increases in analyst interest by observing analysts who do not cover a firm but participate in that firm's earnings conference...

We posit that a change in analyst interest in a firm is an early indicator of the firm's future fundamentals, capital market activities, and stock returns. We measure increases in analyst interest by observing analysts who do not cover a firm but participate in that firm's earnings conference...

This paper investigates the association between investor sentiment and accounting conservatism. We find that managers recognize economic losses in earnings in a more timely manner during periods of high investor sentiment. Further, the sentiment-conservatism relation is stronger for firms with...

We examine firms' financial reporting practices during stub periods that are induced by fiscal year changes and not covered by regular quarters. We find that firms report much lower income for the missing months than for adjacent quarters, mainly by recording higher operating expenses. We also...

Based on 16,604 observations between 1994 and 2006, this study revisits the “horizon problem” by examining how CEO retirement affects conditional accounting conservatism. We hypothesize and find that firms become less conservative in their financial reporting before the retirement of their...

We examine whether and how auditors respond to audit risks arising from secrecy culture when making audit opinions decisions. Using a sample of international Big N auditors from 33 countries, we find strong and robust evidence that auditors are more likely to issue modified audit opinions to...

A fundamental property of accrual accounting is to smooth temporary timing fluctuations in operating cash flows, indicating an inherent negative correlation between accruals and cash flows. We show that the overall correlation between accruals and cash flows has dramatically declined in...

Both intuition and evidence suggest that tax expense reflects value lost to taxes paid. Inconsistent with this traditional valuation role for tax expense, some recent research finds that tax expense surprise, especially its current component, is positively associated with stock returns. Holding...