Knowledge that Transforms

The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) is decentralized, wherein field offices coordinated at the state level undertake inspections. We study whether this structure can lead to interstate frictions in sharing information and how this impacts firms’ compliance with workplace safety laws. We find that firms caught violating in one state subsequently violate less in that state but violate more in other states. Despite this pattern, and in keeping with information frictions, violations in one state do not trigger proactive OSHA inspections in other states. Moreover, firms face lower monetary penalties when subsequent violations occur across state lines, likely due to the lack of documentation necessary to assess severe penalties. Finally, firms are more likely to shift violating behavior into states with greater information frictions. Our findings suggest that internal information within regulators impacts the likelihood and location of corporate misconduct.

A higher U.S. government debt‐to‐output (D‐O) ratio does not forecast higher surpluses or lower returns on Treasurys in the future. Neither future cash flows nor discount rates account for the variation in the current D‐O ratio. The market valuation of Treasurys is surprisingly insensitive to macro fundamentals. Instead, the future D‐O ratio accounts for most of the variation because the D‐O ratio is highly persistent. Systematic surplus forecast errors may help account for these findings. Since the start of the Global Financial Crisis, surplus projections have anticipated a large fiscal correction that failed to materialize.

Interest in sustainability information, from investors, managers, researchers, and others, has been expanding rapidly. We discuss recent advances and open questions related to sustainability reporting and disclosure through the lens of a supply and demand framework. Our discussion builds on prior research on financial reporting and highlights unique aspects of the provision of sustainability information.

The economic role of an accounting regime is to increase welfare through its effects—in conjunction with complementary institutions—on firm and household behavior. I review three major streams of the archival literature (real effects; price effects, including value relevance; and costly contracting), in terms of what they can and cannot reveal as proxies for welfare effects. One conclusion is that the partial correlations and average effects that predominate in this literature have provided valuable insights into the role of accounting in the economy, but provide limited and misleading proxies for welfare effects. A major concern is that teachers, students, and researchers—indeed, regulators and standard setters—raised on this literature could lose sight of, and underestimate, the fundamental contribution of accounting to aggregate welfare.

Forward‐looking information, often used by auditors to evaluate complex estimates and form conclusions about going‐concern audit report modifications, is commonly disclosed voluntarily by U.S. public companies. We experimentally examine how this disclosure behavior affects auditors’ skepticism toward such information. Prior research has shown that investors and analysts frequently interpret voluntarily disclosed forward‐looking information as credible. We demonstrate that auditors, in contrast, exhibit greater skepticism toward forecasted information that has been voluntarily disclosed (vs. mandatorily disclosed or held privately) because of their reduced trust in management, even when the forecasts align with prior year trends (vs. being more optimistic). Our results suggest that a manager's decision to disclose, rather than the disclosure content itself, leads to increased auditor skepticism. Our findings have implications not only for audit outcomes, but also for manager disclosure behavior, as increased auditor scrutiny could discourage future voluntary disclosure.

Using misstatement data, we find that the distribution of detected fraud features a heavy tail. We propose a theoretical mechanism that explains such a relatively high frequency of extreme frauds. In our dynamic model, a manager manipulates earnings for personal gain. A monitor of uncertain quality can detect fraud and punish the manager. As the monitor fails to detect fraud, the manager's posterior belief about the monitor's effectiveness decreases. Over time, the manager's learning leads to a slippery slope, in which the size of frauds grows steeply, and to a power law for detected fraud. Empirical analyses corroborate the slippery slope and the learning channel. As a policy implication, we establish that a higher detection intensity can increase fraud by enabling the manager to identify an ineffective monitor more quickly. Further, nondetection of frauds below a materiality threshold, paired with a sufficiently steep punishment scheme, can prevent large frauds.

Fixed effects (FE) have emerged as a ubiquitous and powerful tool for eliminating unwanted variation in observational accounting studies. Unwanted variation is plentiful in accounting research because we often use rich data to test precise hypotheses derived from abstract theories. By eliminating unwanted variation, FE reduce concerns that omitted variables bias our estimates or weaken test power. FE are not costless, though, so their use should be carefully justified by theoretical and institutional considerations. FE also transform samples and variables in ways that are not immediately apparent, and in doing so affect how we should interpret regression results. This primer explains the mechanics of FE and provides practical guidance for the informed use, transparent reporting, and careful interpretation of FE models.

We exploit the introduction of the Payment Practices Disclosure Regulation in the United Kingdom (UK) to examine the effects of mandating disclosure of customer‐supplier payment practices. We find that nondisclosing small and medium‐sized enterprises (SMEs) experience a reduction in their accounts receivable by 8.3%, consistent with an acceleration of their trade credit collections. Further, SMEs exhibit fewer financial constraints after the regulation. We survey managers from large firms and SMEs to understand the underlying mechanisms. The required disclosures raise large firms’ reputational concerns and shift the bargaining power between large firms and SMEs. Additionally, the new disclosures compel executives at large firms to scrutinize their own firms’ payment practices, leading to increased accountability and a stronger focus on timely payment among senior managers.

GAAP provisions in loan contracts specify how to address the effect of accounting changes on financial covenants. I document a pronounced upward trend in and the dominance of frozen‐on‐request (FOR) GAAP provisions, which incorporate accounting changes unless either the borrower or the lender requests a freeze. FOR GAAP streamlines the process of incorporating accounting changes into covenant calculations by obviating the need for renegotiations and prevents opportunistic GAAP freezes by requiring good faith renegotiations. Therefore, FOR GAAP is more likely to incorporate accounting changes beneficial to covenant informativeness, leading to lower false positives (i.e., Type I errors of financial covenant violations) and false negatives (i.e., Type II errors of financial covenant violations). Based on a large sample of loan contracts, I find that FOR GAAP decreases false positives and false negatives after controlling for self‐selection bias and that the decrease is more pronounced when accounting changes relevant to financial covenants are more significant. My study provides new evidence of the role accounting standards and GAAP provisions play in debt contracting efficiency.

We investigate whether improvements in banks' organizational capital and control systems facilitate increased loan origination to minority borrowers. We focus on bank supervisors' enforcement decisions and orders (EDOs) against banks and hypothesize that EDO‐imposed improvements in loan policies, internal governance, and employee training mitigate deficiencies in credit assessments and lending decisions that previously disadvantaged minority borrowers. We find that mortgage origination to minority borrowers increases following the resolution of EDOs, and more so for banks with stricter supervisors or more severe EDOs. Using a semisupervised machine learning method to analyze the text of EDOs, we find that such increases are higher for EDOs specifying revisions of loan policies, implementation of formal internal governance procedures, or more employee training. Overall, we find that EDO‐driven improvements in organizational capital generate unintended, positive social externalities that enhance access to credit for minority borrowers.