Earnings Quality and Ownership Structure: The Role of Private Equity Sponsors

This paper is based on my dissertation at Columbia University, which won the 2007 AAA Competitive Manuscript Award as well as the 2007 AAA Financial Accounting and Reporting Section, Best Dissertation Award. I would like to thank my committee members?Andrew Ang, Daniel Cohen, Bjorn Jorgensen (sponsor), Doron Nissim, and Stephen Penman (chair)?for their guidance and support. I would also like to thank the following for their helpful comments: Nerissa Brown, Fabrizio Ferri, Dan Givoly, Carla Hayn, Paul Healy, Yael Hochberg, Michael Kimbrough, Gregory Miller, Partha Mohanram, Edward Riedl, Joseph Weber, Yuan Zhang, and the participants in workshops at the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, the AAA 2006 annual meeting, Columbia University, Duke University, the EAA 2007 annual congress, Harvard University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, NBER - New World of Private Equity Conference, Northwestern University, Penn State University, the University of California?Berkeley, the University of California?Los Angeles, the University of Chicago, the University of Michigan, the University of Notre Dame, and Yale. I thank Joseph Marren, my former colleague at the M&A department of Citigroup Investment Banking, for his insightful feedback. I also want to thank my wife, Elissa Swift Katz, for her support during the process. I gratefully acknowledge financial support from Columbia Business School, the Deloitte Doctoral Fellowship, and Harvard Business School. All errors are mine.
The views expressed herein are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research.