Abstract I provide evidence on the demand for auditor reputation by examining the defections of Arthur Andersen LLP's clients following the accounting scandals and criminal conviction marring the auditor's reputation in 2002. About 95 percent of clients in my sample did not switch auditors until after Andersen was indicted for criminal misconduct regarding its failed audit of Enron Corp. I test whether the timing of client defections and the choice of a new auditor are consistent with managers' incentives to mitigate potentially costly information and agency problems. I find that clients defected sooner, mostly to another Big 5 auditor, if they were more visible in the capital markets; such clients attracted more analysts and press coverage, had larger institutional ownership and share turnover, and raised more cash in recent security issues. However, my proxies for agency conflicts — managerial ownership and financial leverage — are not associated with the timing of defections or the choice of new auditor. Overall, my study suggests that firms more visible in the capital markets tend to be more concerned about engaging highly reputable auditors, consistent with such firms trying to build and preserve their own reputations for credible financial reporting.

I present evidence consistent with managers using derivatives and discretionary accruals as partial substitutes for smoothing earnings. Using 1994–1996 data for a sample of Fortune 500 firms, I estimate a set of simultaneous equations that captures managers' incentives to maintain a desired level of earnings volatility through hedging and accrual management. These incentives include increasing managerial compensation and wealth, reducing corporate income taxes and debt financing costs, avoiding underinvestment and earnings surprises, and mitigating volatility caused by low diversification. After controlling for such incentives, I find a significant negative association between derivatives' notional amounts and proxies for the magnitude of discretionary accruals.

We examine whether availability of higher quality financial information lessens investor losses during a period seen as a stock market crash. We focus on October 1929, which partly motivated sweeping financial reporting regulations in the 1930s. Using a sample of 540 common stocks traded on the New York Stock Exchange during October 1929, we find that the quality of firms’ financial reporting increases with managers’ incentives to supply higher quality financial information demanded by investors. Moreover, firms with higher quality financial reporting before October 1929 experienced smaller stock price declines during the market crash.

The balance sheet accumulates the effects of previous accounting choices, so the level of net assets partly reflects the extent of previous earnings management. We predict that managers' ability to optimistically bias earnings decreases with the extent to which the balance sheet overstates net assets relative to a neutral application of GAAP. To test this prediction, we examine the likelihood of reporting various earnings surprises for 3,649 firms during 1993–1999. Consistent with our prediction, we find that the likelihood of reporting larger positive or smaller negative earnings surprises decreases with our proxy for overstated net asset values.

Managers often provide self-serving disclosures that blame poor financial performance on temporary external factors. Results of an experiment conducted with 124 financial analysts suggest that when analysts perceive such disclosures as plausible, they provide higher earnings forecasts and stock valuations than if the explanation had not been provided. However, we also show that these disclosures can backfire if analysts find them implausible. Specifically, implausible explanations that blame poor performance on temporary external factors lead analysts to provide lower earnings forecasts and assess a higher cost of capital than if the explanation had not been provided.

ABSTRACT: We examine the value relevance of a comprehensive set of summary performance measures including sales, earnings, comprehensive income, and operating cash flows. We find that, while value relevance peaks for measures “above the line,” no single measure dominates around the world. Instead, a measure is more relevant when it captures, directly and quickly, information about firms’ cash flows. Specifically, for each performance measure by country, we estimate eight attributes commonly used to assess earnings quality. We find these attributes highly correlated—most of their variance is explained by only two principal factors. A factor capturing articulation with cash flows is positively associated with a measure’s value relevance; a factor reflecting the measure’s persistence, predictability, smoothness, and conservatism is negatively associated. Our results suggest that, when it comes to equity valuation, accounting researchers and standard-setters should focus not on what performance measure is “best” at a given point in time, but on the underlying attributes that investors find most relevant.

ABSTRACT Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, we capture neural activity in the ventral striatum—a key area in the human brain's reward processing circuit—of 35 adult investors learning the earnings per share disclosed by 60 publicly traded companies. Before imaging, investors forecasted each company's earnings and took either a long or a short position in its stock. Consistent with prospect theory, we find strong neurobiological evidence of an asymmetric reaction to positive and negative earnings surprises. Moreover, investors' personality traits and investment positions, as well as firms' earnings predictability, modulate the brain's reaction to earnings news. We also find a strong association between the magnitude of the brain's reaction and risk-adjusted stock returns and abnormal share trading around earnings announcements for our sample firms; these findings evince the brain's reaction to earnings news as an alternative, biological measure of the information content of earnings. Data Availability: Data are available from the authors.