Does Good Corporate Governance Improve Financial Statements?

Financial statements are supposed to provide useful information to a wide variety of users: equity analysts, investors, creditors, even prospective employees wanting to make sure they’re not about to board a sinking ship. But corporate boards don’t have fiduciary obligations to all of those different groups, and it turns out that this shows up in how they present themselves.

“The likelihood that firms will manipulate their reporting to circumvent debt covenants is higher when directors owe fiduciary duties only to equity holders, rather than when they owe fiduciary duties also to creditors,” write Tel Aviv University professor Shai Levi, Fordham University and The Hebrew University associate professor...