...Scott A. Robinson; A. Nicole Skinner; Jasmine Wang ABSTRACT We examine how managers’ incentives to minimize litigation risk interact with the unique features of environmental information to shape disclosure decisions. We rely on peer firms’ lawsuits to generate variation in environmental...

...Terrence P. Blackburne; Phillip J. Quinn ABSTRACT We examine cross-sectional variation in disclosure speed by using data that allow us to measure when managers learn of SEC investigations and the time lag until subsequent disclosures. We document that external monitoring and litigation risk...

... expertise) report more conservatively. We also find that GC firms recalibrate their conservatism levels in response to changes in the legal environment—their conservatism choices are more responsive to litigation against peer firms and to two judicial rulings that affected the litigation risk for firms...

... Circuit Court ruling litigation risk CEO incentives equity-based compensation misreporting Incentive compensation comes in various forms and, fundamentally, serves as a governance tool to alleviate agency conflicts between shareholders and CEOs. Firms use equity-based compensation to tie CEOs...

... information about blamed events than blameless events due to concerns about reputation and litigation risks. We identify material negative economic events that are observable through public sources and examine whether blame attribution for the event influences the firm's subsequent event-related disclosure...

... disclosure boilerplate litigation risk securities lawsuits SEC comment letters disclosure regulation Official guidance from regulators and the judiciary explicitly discourages boilerplate disclosures and indicates that risk factor disclosures should be concise and tailored to the specific risks...

... beating benchmarks, those with abnormal insider trading, and those likely to violate debt covenants—weakly governed firms, and firms with high ex ante litigation risk decrease reporting conservatism after UD. Our results suggest that the relation between the litigation environment and reporting...

... liability. One implication of this safe harbor is that litigation risk potentially varies between qualitative forward- and non-forward-looking statements. Consistent with this implication, we find that positive tone in forward-looking qualitative statements is significantly less related to the likelihood...

...Joel F. Houston; Chen Lin; Sibo Liu; Lai Wei ABSTRACT This paper documents that changes in litigation risk affect corporate voluntary disclosure practices. We make causal inferences by exploiting three legal events that generate exogenous variations in firms' litigation risk. Using a matching...

... Conservatism?” Editor's note: Accepted by John Harry Evans III. Supplemental material can be accessed by clicking the link in Appendix B . August 2012 April 2015 2016 conservatism audit fee going concern audit opinion auditor resignation litigation risk misstatement...

... that the direction of news in the announcement plays a role in the timing decision. We test and find that this latter result is partly attributable to potential costs associated with the omission of material negative information, such as litigation risk. JEL Classifications: D82; G14; G39; M41. We...