This paper examines the effects of financial reporting on corporate innovation. After controlling for other determinants of corporate innovation, I find that firms with higher-quality financial reporting exhibit greater innovation. I show that the relation between financial reporting quality and innovation is more pronounced for firms that have greater growth opportunities, those that operate i...

Judicial Branch. We thank John Jiang for generously providing us the SAS code for computing executive incentives. We thank the Abstract We examine the influence of general counsel on firms' accounting quality and earnings management practices. We consider two views of the role of general counsel and how they relate to financial reporting. The first is the " gatekeeper " role in which the genera...

We provide evidence on the long standing concern on auditor conflicts of interest from providing non-audit services (NAS) to audit clients by using rarely explored NAS fee data from 1978-80. Using this earlier setting, we find cross-sectional evidence of improved earnings quality when auditors provide NAS, especially those related to information services. This is consistent with better audit qu...

We examine the association between employee quality and financial reporting outcomes. Using the average workforce education level in MSA(s) where the firm operates as a proxy for employee quality, we find that firms with a high-quality workforce exhibit higher accruals quality, fewer internal control violations, and fewer restatements. These firms also issue superior management forecasts, in te...