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This study examines whether and how business strategy influences a firm's over- and under-investment decisions. Prospector and defender strategies expose firms to different required levels of investment, monitoring, and managerial discretion, which have implications for managerial investment decisions. Our results provide evidence that firms with an innovation-orientated prospector strategy are more likely to over-invest, whereas firms following an efficiency-orientated defender strategy are more likely to under-invest. These over- and under-investments are associated with poorer future firm performance. Moreover, the level of over- (under-) investment is exacerbated in the presence of more stock- (cash-) based compensation in prospector (defender) firms. Our results are robust to a number of checks such as ordered logit analysis, individual components of business strategy, individual components of investment, year-by-year and industry-by-industry analysis, controlling for lagged investment residuals, controlling for firm fixed-effects, first-differenced specifications, and propensity score matching.

SYNOPSIS This study examines whether the relationship between managerial ability and audit fees is conditional on financial distress. We find that higher managerial ability increases audit fees in financially distressed firms and decreases audit fees in non-distressed firms. We also observe that financially distressed firms with higher-ability managers display lower accrual quality and a higher likelihood of restatement. Moreover, higher-ability managers in distressed firms engage more in opportunistic financial reporting to concurrently maximize equity-based compensation and cope with debt refinancing pressures, which increases audit risks and results in greater audit fees. We confirm our results using a battery of sensitivity and additional analyses.

SUMMARY This study investigates the impact of backscratching between the CEO and directors on a firm's future performance, financial reporting quality, and audit fees. We find that the presence and extent of boardroom backscratching are associated with weaker future performance, poorer quality financial reporting, and higher audit fees. We attribute these findings to backscratching firms' increased business and information risks inducing auditors to exert greater effort and charge risk premiums in response to heightened audit engagement risks. We observe consistent results when extending our investigation to backscratching between the CEO and audit committee and between the CEO and the CFO, given that the audit committee and the CFO influence financial reporting quality. Finally, we provide evidence that backscratching firms display greater audit report lag and a higher likelihood of receiving a going concern audit opinion. Our study offers insights to regulators concerning policy development to strengthen board effectiveness and remuneration disclosures.