We study management turnover for the top five executives in a sample of 443 large firms from 1993 through 1998. The rate of forced turnover for non-CEOs is at least as great as that for CEOs, but the sensitivity of turnover to firm performance is smaller for non-CEOs. The probability that a non-CEO leaves office is elevated around CEO dismissals, particularly when the replacement CEO is an outsider. Many dismissed executives obtain new employment, but on average their new positions are significantly inferior to their prior jobs. Labor market outcomes are related to past compensation and the circumstances around departure.

We report that insurance firms manage loss reserves to avoid violating certain test ratio bounds (known as IRIS ratios) that are used by regulators for solvency assessment. In our sample, almost two-thirds of the firms that would violate four or more IRIS ratios successfully adjust reserves to reduce the reported number of violations to less than four. This finding is significant because four violations usually trigger regulatory intervention. Our results indicate that non-earnings goals are an important influence on discretionary accounting choice. They also suggest that reserve manipulation can postpone needed regulatory intervention, sometimes for an extended period.

We examine whether repricing underwater stock options reduces executive and overall employee turnover using a sample of firms that reprice stock options in 1998 and a sample of firms with underwater stock options that choose not to reprice. We find little evidence that repricing affects executive turnover. However, using forfeited stock options to proxy for overall employee turnover, we find that 1999 employee turnover is negatively related to the 1998 repricing, suggesting that repricing helps prevent turnover due to underwater options. We find no evidence that the relation between turnover and repricing differs between high technology and nonhigh technology firms.

In this paper, we use a web-based sampling methodology to obtain and content analyze a large sample of modified audit opinions. Based on this analysis, we re-examine whether certain modified audit opinions are associated with abnormal accruals. We find that the documented relation between modified opinions and abnormal accruals rests with companies that have going-concern opinions. These firms have large negative accruals that are likely due to severe financial distress. Overall, we find no evidence to support inferences in previous research that firms receiving modified audit opinions manage earnings more than those receiving clean opinions.

We investigate the stock price reaction to UK going-concern audit report disclosures in the calendar year subsequent to publication. Over this period our firm population underperforms by between 24% and 31% depending on the benchmark adopted. This market underreaction to such an unambiguous bad news release is not a post-earnings announcement drift phenomenon; it is also robust to other potentially confounding explanations. However, whatever the reasons for such stock mispricing, we find costly arbitrage prevents rational investors forcing prices back into line with fundamental value. Our results have implications for the market's ability to impound bad news appropriately and the incompleteness of arbitrage in such small “loser” firm situations.

We examine the market reaction to a sample of 403 restatements announced from 1995 to 1999. We document an average abnormal return of about −9 percent over a 2-day announcement window. We find that more negative returns are associated with restatements involving fraud, affecting more accounts, decreasing reported income and attributed to auditors or management (but not the Securities and Exchange Commission). There appears to be an additional penalty for announcements that do not quantify the restatement. Finally, we provide evidence on the relation between restatement announcements and analyst earnings forecast dispersion, bid–ask spreads and subsequent revisions in analyst earnings forecasts.