Text

theses

This dissertation is to study the effects of accounting regulation scrutiny, the interaction between accounting regulation and audit regulation and option market’s perceptions of financial misreporting. In the first essay, I examine whether SEC oversight, specifically the review process, plays a significant role in shaping registrants’ incentive to disclose material weakness in ICFR. My main results show that firms receiving SEC comment letters related to internal control disclosure are more likely to disclose material weaknesses in ICFR in the subsequent fiscal year than other firms. More importantly, I do not find that receiving comment letters related to any other disclosure deficiencies will increase firm’s probability to disclose material weaknesses in the subsequent fiscal year. I also find that the SEC’s scrutiny of one issuer could have a deterrence effect on other issuers, by raising the threat of future review or enforcement actions. In the second essay of my dissertation, I examine the overall effectiveness of the current system of PCAOB inspections by exploring the potential information sharing between PCAOB and the SEC, another regulation authority. I find evidence that firms are more likely to receive the SEC comment letters after their auditors get PCAOB inspection reports that disclose higher rate of audit deficiencies. This finding is not driven by audit specific attributes and other audit quality measures. Moreover, I ruled out the possible spurious relationship and found that firms are more likely to receive SEC comment letters related to revenue recognition after their auditors get PCAOB inspection reports that disclose higher rate of revenue audit deficiencies. In the third chapter, I examine whether option market is informed of financial misreporting. I find that restatement firms have higher implied volatility skew before the revelation date than matched industry peer firms that do not have restatements. My results also indicate that implied volatility skew could predict stock market’s negative reaction to restatements and the volatility skew is positively associated with the materiality of restatements. In addition, short interests are positively associated with volatility skew, suggesting both short sellers and option traders are informative of financial misreporting.

ETD_6646

Ph.D.

Includes bibliographical references

by Li He

doi:10.7282/T3833V1J

ETD doctoral

The author owns the copyright to this work.