This study provides a theoretical framework and experimental evidence on how managers' disclosure decisions affect their credibility with investors. I find that in the short-term, more forthcoming disclosure has a positive effect on management's reporting credibility, especially when management is forthcoming about negative news. However, these short-term credibility effects do not persist over time. In the long-term, managers who report positive earnings news are rated as having higher reporting credibility than managers who report negative earnings news, regardless of their previous disclosure decisions.

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 To effectively manage audit risk, auditors must correctly predict the potential litigation and reputation consequences associated with inaccurate accounting estimates. Accurate predictions are critical because underestimation of negative consequences leads to excess legal exposure and overestimation leads to overauditing. Our paper examines whether auditors correctly anticipate these litigation and reputation outcomes. We provide manager‐ and partner‐level auditors with case facts from an auditor negligence lawsuit and ask them to predict the proportion of juries that will return verdicts against their firm. We then compare auditors' predictions to the actual verdicts we observe when we provide the same set of case facts to mock jurors who deliberate as part of juries. We find that auditors overestimate the likelihood of negligence verdicts, especially when audit quality is relatively high. Our supplemental measures help explain the reasons for this overestimation: auditors tend to underestimate jurors' perceptions of audit quality and willingness to attribute inaccurate estimates to situational factors. Finally, we examine auditors' predictions about how a news article about the litigation will affect their reputation with the general public. Similar to our litigation results, we find that auditors tend to overestimate the article's negative impact on auditor reputation. Collectively, our findings suggest that auditors overestimate litigation and reputation consequences resulting from inaccurate accounting estimates. This overestimation is consequential as it leads to inefficient allocation of audit resources.

ABSTRACT We conduct an experiment with 749 mock jurors to examine whether juries evaluate auditors differently under precise versus imprecise standards when the client reporting is held constant. We find that the impact of standard precision on jury verdicts depends on the aggressiveness of the audit client's financial reports and on the industry reporting norm. When the client's reporting is more aggressive and violates the precise standard, juries return fewer verdicts against auditors under the imprecise standard, especially when the reporting complies with the industry norm. When the client's reporting is less aggressive and complies with the precise standard, juries return more verdicts against auditors under the imprecise standard, but only when the client's reporting is more aggressive than the industry norm. Compliance with industry reporting norms appears to provide auditors with safe harbor protection from negligence verdicts when accounting standards are imprecise.

This paper proposes and tests a risk model that explains how investors perceive financial risks. The model combines conventional decision-theory variables—probabilities and outcomes—with behavioral variables from psychology research by Slovic (1987), such as the extent to which a risky item is new, causes worry, and is controllable. To test our model, we conduct two studies in which M.B.A. students judge the risk of a broad range of financial items. Our results indicate that both the decisiontheory variables and Slovic's (1987) behavioral variables are important in explaining investors' risk judgments. Further, we demonstrate that information about the amount of potential loss outcome contained within mandated risk disclosures not only directly influences risk judgments, but also indirectly affects such judgments via its effect on some of Slovic's (1987) behavioral variables. By identifying this unintended consequence of current risk disclosures, these results have the potential to influence the way accounting regulators, firm managers, and academic researchers think about risk disclosure.