I find evidence consistent with managers manipulating real activities to avoid reporting annual losses. Specifically, I find evidence suggesting price discounts to temporarily increase sales, overproduction to report lower cost of goods sold, and reduction of discretionary expenditures to improve reported margins. Cross-sectional analysis reveals that these activities are less prevalent in the ...

We analyze optimal protection when a benevolent government must maintain nonnegative domestic profits and when the domestic import-competing firm has private information about its costs. A costly audit mechanism can deter strategic manipulation of this private information. We show that a high-penalty/lowprobability of investigation is optimal when the shadow price of the firm profit is low comp...

Voting in uncontrolled environments, such as the Internet comes with a price, the price of having to trust in uncontrolled machines the collection of voter’s vote. An uncontrolled machine, e.g. the voter’s PC, may be infected with a virus or other malicious program that may try to change the voter’s vote without her knowledge. Here we present CodeVoting, a technique to create a secure communica...

The primary purpose of this research was to subject Conlon and Garland’s (1993; Garland & Conlon, 1998) project completion hypothesis to a stronger test than it has faced in the past. We conducted an experiment in which we manipulated the degree of completion, sunk-cost amount, and anticipated sales price for a hypothetical real estate development project. The sales price information allowed pa...

The Shanghai Stock Exchange changed its trading mechanism of the preceding three minutes to closing from continuous call auction on August 20, 2018, while Shenzhen had already this in 2006. Taking all A-shared stocks’ data 2017 2019 as our sample, we construct difference-in-difference models and find significant volume shifts trading. We also see a increase volatility trading, but decrease pric...

Efficiency in data manipulation is of vital importance to ERP systems. Flexible data manipulation API helps to address a number of acute needs of end users and application developers. To be efficient the API must meet a number of requirements: (i) allow data operations at any granularity level, (ii) guarantee data integrity, (iii) be scalable, (iv) allow cross-platform invocations, (v) be conve...