Congress has provided $175 billion in financial relief to hospitals and other healthcare providers based on predictions that they would face financial difficulties due to COVID-19. We provide initial evidence about the financial impact of COVID-19 on hospitals based on publicly traded hospital companies. 

News media and regulators have focused on the number of affected individuals in a healthcare data breach, but not the type of information breached, which carries different risk and consequences. Based on detailed event descriptions, we found that the most common breaches involve nonmedical information that could be exploited for identity theft or financial fraud, rather than sensitive medical information. 

What triggers a data breach among healthcare providers? We examine the detailed descriptions of more than 1,100 healthcare data breaches that affected 164 million patients and find that internal mistakes or neglect account for more than half of the data breaches. 

Despite the active research in the past forty years, whether Big N auditors provide higher audit quality than non-Big N auditors remains a debate. The challenge is that firms do not choose auditors randomly. Any differences in audit quality associated with Big N auditors could simply reflect the impact of observable firm or auditor characteristics that drive firms' audit choices. We overcome this challenge by identifying a setting where firms' switch to Big N auditors could be attributed to exogenous shocks. 

Many AAA rated structured finance products suffered large losses in the financial crisis. The media and policy makers alleged that many of these securities were actually devised by former analysts who previously worked for rating agencies. We empirically examine these allegations by collecting analysts transition data from LinkedIn. 

Drawing from the extensive archive of documents made publicly available by the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) dating back to the issuance of its first standard in 1973, we analyze the life cycle of a comprehensive set of projects from the time the projects were placed on the agenda to the formal approval or abandonment by the Board. We provide rich descriptive statistics about the FASB's decision process, focusing on agenda-setting, frequently recurring topics in standard-setting over time, and the association between Board members' professional backgrounds and their standard-setting decisions. Specifically, we explore the following questions: 1) Why is an issue added to or removed from the FASB's agenda? 2) What organizations bring to the FASB's attention an issue that ultimately leads to the issuance of an accounting standard? 3) What are the most common recurring topics observed across accounting standards over time? and 4) Are Board members' professional backgrounds associated with their evalua- tion of proposed standards?

We examine what hospitals are more likely to experience a data breach. 

In 2007, OTC Markets Group assigned each Pink Sheets company to a disclosure tier and affixed a colorful graphic to its stock symbol signifying the company’s public disclosure level. This unique setting allows us to investigate the impact of increased salience of disclosure practices on liquidity. 

We examine how the stock market reacted to former FASB chairman Bob Herz’s unexpected resignation on August 24, 2010 to measure an individual standard setter’s influence on the capital market. This exogenous shock to the standard-setting process enables us to evaluate the net effect of a substantial accounting standard using financial market data. The results provide empirical evidence for the debate on fair value accounting. They also help to explain why practitioners care about who serves on the FASB.

We examine whether charging bond issuers for credit ratings leads to higher ratings by exploiting a historical setting when the S&P switched from investor-pay to issuer pay in July 1974 while Moody's  made the switch in October 1970.  

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