3in both these age specifications.
6. Conclusions
In this paper, we investigate whether firms’ awareness of the SEC’s enforcement activities and publicly observed
data on the SEC’s resource constraints affect firms’ propensity to violate GAAP. We find two interesting results
about the SEC’s role in influencing firms’ decision to commit violations. First, counties closer to the SEC are associated
with significantly lower misreporting deviations. Second, the misreporting intensity is decreasing in the past SEC
enforcement actions in that county. The results support the ‘‘differentially informed criminal’’ hypothesis that firms have
heterogeneous information about regulatory oversight and therefore, differ in their perceived costs of misreporting.
However, this finding is also consistent with an alternative explanation that prior enforcement actions have busted many
of the crooks, leaving fewer ‘‘bad apples’’ in the county. We also find evidence in support of the ‘‘constrained cop’’
hypothesis which posits that the SEC is more likely to investigate firms that are located closer to its offices and have
received greater media attention.
The literature on the recent wave of earnings restatements has emphasized the role of the benefits and ex post
costs of misreporting to the executives and firms, as well as, the failure of governance mechanisms in deterring
misreporting. The evidence in this paper suggests differences in firms’ ex-ante information sets. In other words,
costs perceived by managers before they decide to misreport are potentially also important in explaining why firms
adopt aggressive accounting practices in the first place. Mitigating these information differences either through the
establishment of local SEC offices or via better disbursement of information might lower the probability of misreporting in
the future.