Legislators and the courts have begun to recognize the importance of how electronically stored data should be maintained and secured, and how electronic data should be differentiated from their paper analogs. Examples of some of the sweeping pieces of electronic record management legislation include the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) of 1996, the Gramm-Leach-Bliley ...

Legislators have begun to recognize the importance of how electronically stored data should be maintained and secured. Similarly, the courts have begun to differentiate electronic data from their paper analogs. Examples of some sweeping electronic record management legislation include: the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) of 1996, the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act (GLBA) of ...

We examine the impact of corporate risk-taking on firm-level real earnings management. find that firms with higher engage in Our results are robust to a series robustness tests, including simultaneous least squares approach, firm fixed effect, change analysis, and pseudo difference-in-difference analysis. Additional analyses reveal management is more pronounced among experience prior-year loss ...

There has been widespread public debate over the effectiveness of corporate governance practices in firms. One of the main concerns is that CEOs take advantage of accounting discretion to misreport financial information and to extract excess compensation (rents) from shareholders. Thus, the connection between CEO compensation and financial misstatements has received considerable attention. Due ...

This study builds on structural elaboration theory by developing a model to explain the adoption of board structures that appear to conform to the prevailing institutional logic, but which in fact contradict it. We test our theory with the case of CEO-only board structures, a formal increase in board independence that prior research has shown to lead to greater CEO entrenchment rather than incr...

Foreign firms terminate their Securities and Exchange Commission registration in the aftermath of the Sarbanes–Oxley Act (SOX) because they no longer require outside funds to finance growth opportunities. Deregistering firms’ insiders benefit from greater discretion to consume private benefits without having to raise higher cost funds. Foreign firms with more agency problems have worse stock-pr...

To curb tax avoidance and evasion through charitable foundations, the Tax Reform Act of 1969 imposed regulatory requirements similar to those that would be included in the Sarbanes-Oxley Act over 30 years later. I have compiled the first longitudinal data set spanning the introduction of the new regulations by digitizing directories that included both affected and unaffected foundations. The re...

In response to the enactment of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act 2002 and of the release of the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (PCAOB) Auditing Standard No. 5, this study develops a risk-based evidential reasoning approach for assessing the effectiveness of internal controls over financial reporting (ICoFR). This approach provides a structured methodology for assessing the effectiveness of ICo...