How Do Accounting Practices Spread? An Examination of Law Firm Networks and Stock Option Backdating

We thank Yonca Ertimur, Rachel Hayes, Justin Hopkins, Chad Larson, Claire Perry, Richard Sloan, Eugene Soltes, Srinivasan Sankaraguruswamy, Roman Weil, two anonymous referees, participants at Dartmouth University, the 2016 University of Houston Accounting Conference, 2016 Accounting Conference at The Pennsylvania State University, 2016 American Accounting Association Western Region Meeting, 2017 University of Southern California, Berkeley-Stanford Conference, 2018 New York University Accounting Conference, 2018 Tulane University Accounting Conference, 2018 Accounting and Finance Association of Australia and New Zealand Doctoral Consortium, the London School of Economics, the 2019 Massachusetts Institute of Technology Asia Doctoral Consortium, and the 2019 Indian Institute of Management Bangalore First Accounting Conference for helpful comments. We are grateful to Margaret Fong for providing valuable research assistance.

Patricia M. Dechow, University of Southern California, Marshall School of Business, Department of Accounting, Los Angeles, CA, USA; Samuel T. Tan, Singapore Management University, School of Accountancy, Singapore.

Editor's note: Accepted by Rachel M. Hayes, under the Senior Editorship of Mark L. DeFond.