III. SECURITIES MARKET INTERMEDIARIES ............................................. 283 A. Securities Analysts ....................................................................... 283 B. Auditors........................................................................................ 291 C. Proxy Advisory Services .............................................................. 294 D. Sharehold...

This paper addresses primarily the implications of the tort of defamation for the existence of political dishonesty in a society where the media have a wide impact and can influence electoral behavior. We present a model in which the tabloids have better information than society. Newspapers can monitor corruption and are, in a sense, auditors of politicians. The use of tabloids as auditors is l...

This study includes the most diverse stakeholder population integrated into one research study regarding perceptions of fi nancial statement audits conducted by Big 4 accounting fi rms. Whereas prior studies almost exclusively used either archival data or experiments to implicitly derive the stakeholders ’ perceptions, this study employed focus groups with fi nancial statement (1) preparers; (2...

In many regulated markets, private, third-party auditors are chosen and paid by the firms that they audit, potentially creating a conflict of interest. This paper reports on a twoyear field experiment in the Indian state of Gujarat that sought to curb such a conflict by altering the market structure for environmental audits of industrial plants to incentivize accurate reporting. There are three...

A uditors are supposed to be watchdogs, but in the last decade or so, they sometimes looked like lapdogs—more interested in serving the companies they audited than in assuring a fl ow of accurate information to investors. The auditing profession is based on what looks like a structural infi rmity: auditors are paid by the companies they audit. An old German proverb holds: “Whose bread I eat, hi...