SAMPLE SELECTION
The GAO’s restatement database was used as the starting point for our data search. As shown in Table 1, the GAO database listed 919 restatements between January 1,1997 and June 30, 2002. Of the 919 restatements on the GAO database, we exclude 169 due to lack of Compustat data. We then use Lexis-Nexis to find restatement announcements for the remaining 750 in order to determine the time period of the original misstatement (the GAO database only codes the year in which the restatement is announced). For observations with multiple years of misstatements, we code the earliest year that the company misstated its financial statements. We are unable to find restatement announcements for 67 of the observations so we drop them from the sample, leaving 683 observations.