Although Holmstrom’s informativeness criterion provides a theoretical foundation for the controllability principle and interfirm relative performance evaluation, empirical and field studies provide only weak evidence on such practices. This paper refines the traditional informativeness...

This paper examines the deterrence effect of two auditing rules via a laboratory experiment. A traditional rule which is usually assumed in the auditing literature, audits a taxpayer with a constant probability, which is independent of others' tax returns. A bounded rule recently proposed and...

Academics and practitioners have long recognized the importance of a firm’s industry membership in explaining its financial performance. Yet, contrary to conventional wisdom, recent research shows that industry-specific profitability forecasting models are not better than economy-wide models....

The advantage of multiple sourcing to protect against supplier failures arising from undependable products due to latent defects is examined using a model with non-linear external failure costs. Prior research has focused only on supplier failures arising from unreliable supply, such as...

I formulate a model to emphasize the fraud detection role of auditors in the financial market and relate the role to audit and financial reporting delays. In the model, an auditor considers whether to perform extended audit procedures after observing a red flag generated from regular audit...

A parsimonious model is developed to understand two perplexing, salient features of the distributions of earnings, earnings change, and earnings surprise. The model provides guidance for empirical work to uncover the unmanaged earnings important to firm valuation and public scrutiny, yet...

Building on the knowledge-based view of the resource-based theory, we propose that accounting firms leverage the industry expertise acquired from the audits of the targets’ industries to produce fairer target valuations on merger and acquisitions (M&As). The accounting expertise competitive...

Technological advancement compounds the complexity of competitor identification making it increasingly multi-front and multi-dimensional. Strategic groups are an important unit for competition analysis, typically delineated by firms’ characteristic similarities or cognitive maps. Both have...