Big Signature May Signify Financial Misreporting

The correlation wasn’t dramatic, but it was statistically significant, according to a team of  university researchers. The hard numbers were these: The risk of a restatement goes up by about 50 percent for each square-centimeter increase in the letter size of the CFO’s signature. The researchers acknowledge that size of signature is a “fairly crude proxy” for a big ego, but it’s measurable and the results definitely revealed a pattern. They explain their methods, their logic and what they think is a reasonable takeaway.