Overvalued equity provides a strong incentive for managers to report earnings that do not disappoint the market ( Jensen, 2005 ). We find that this can be extended to highly valued equity more generally. In the year following the classification as highly valued and compared to firms with less extreme valuations, highly valued firms have significantly higher discretionary accruals and exhibit a more pronounced positive association between discretionary accruals and proxies for the likelihood of failing to meet earnings targets. These findings are consistent with the use of discretionary accruals to manage earnings in support of extreme valuation. Because highly valued equity will likely result in CEOs with valuable stock and stock option portfolios, we test whether and show that the overvalued equity incentive is incremental to a CEO's equity portfolio incentive. One implication is that directors and audit committees should be especially on guard for possible earnings management when a firm has extremely high valuation multiples and when the CEO has a lot of equity at risk. Copyright (c) 2010 The Authors Journal compilation (c) 2010 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

Purpose -Audit quality studies document that accruals decrease when the audit firm is large, or the audit firm is an industry specialist, or the audit-client tenure is long. The purpose of this paper is to posit that incentives related to highly-valued equity mitigate these results, as managers use income increasing accruals to augment earnings. Design/methodology/approach -To test this assertion, the authors regress discretionary accruals on: controls, a highly valued equity indicator variable equal to 1 if the client's lagged price-to-earnings ratio is in the highest P/E quintile, indicator variables equal to 1 for alternative measures of audit quality, and interaction terms between the highly valued equity indicator variable and audit quality indicator variables. Findings -Results of tests show positive and statistically significant coefficients for each of the highly-valued equity-audit quality interaction terms, suggesting that when a firm is highly valued the accruals' decreasing effect of high quality auditors is reduced. Originality/value -Beginning with Jensen's article regarding the agency costs of overvalued equity, a stream of research examining factors associated with highly priced firms has developed. The paper extends these findings, as well as the considerable body of audit quality studies, by examining the ability of a high quality auditor to attenuate this result.

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to teach students the fundamental and most critical aspects of performing a financial statement risk assessment, a skill vital to help ensure both auditor and public‐company compliance with guidance found in the Sarbanes‐Oxley Act of 2002 (SOX), the SEC's Interpretative Guidance regarding Management's Report on Internal Control over Financial Reporting, the control deficiency evaluation framework found in Auditing Standard No. 5 (AS5) of the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (PCAOB), and the Committee of Sponsoring Organizations of the Treadway Commission (COSO).Design/methodology/approachThis instructional case study helps students assess the impact of a set of hypothetical internal control deficiency risks in various industries, including inherent and residual financial statement risk assessment, and concludes with determining which identified internal control weaknesses are significant deficiencies and material weaknesses in internal control. Included in the financial statement residual risk assessment process are example entity‐level and process‐level controls described in COSO. Learning objectives, implementation guidance, and the efficacy of using the case study in the undergraduate or graduate auditing or accounting information systems courses are also provided.FindingsThe results of classroom testing of the case study at two universities provides evidence the case study increases student understanding of the implications of internal controls and their impact on the reliability of the financial statements significantly. Students also found the case to be challenging, interesting, relevant, clear, understandable, and a realistic approximation of what they might expect to encounter in the real‐world when performing a financial statement risk assessment.Originality/valueThe case study includes the development of skills important to students in performing financial statement risk assessments, either as an auditor or when working in a private industry environment, including making professional judgments related to risk assessment.

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