Knowledge that Transforms

This study examines the impact of regulatory capital and several of its determinants (i.e., earnings, loan loss provisions, charge-offs and growth) on bank managers' financing decisions and investors' interpretations of those decisions. The analysis is related to two streams of research. We add to the corporate finance literature that seeks to explain the market's reaction to security issuances by developing and testing a refined set of predictions of the demand for debt and equity capital using a sample of capital-regulated firms (banks). We extend the accounting literature that links regulatory capital-management decisions with bank performance by examining whether investors infer that performance. We find that bank managers' financing choices reflect their private information regarding the levels of regulatory capital, earnings, and charge-offs in the issuance year. We document a negative market reaction to capital-increasing issuances and a positive reaction to capital-decreasing issuances. A cross-sectional analysis of that market reaction indicates that investors infer managers' expectations of earnings in the issuance year.

Ideally, firms should jointly solve capacity-planning and product-pricing problems. In practice, informational limitations and cognitive bounds may force firms to sequentially solve the two problems. For example, a firm may plan capacity using limited demand information, and update prices subsequently once additional demand information becomes available. In a simple setting, we characterize the economic loss due to such sequential planning. We use simulation experiments to assess the extent of this loss in more complex settings. We find a relatively low loss if the firm plans for capacity using limited demand information and subsequently adjusts product prices to reflect realized market conditions. However, even “reasonable” restrictions on the subsequent price adjustment (e.g., constraining adjusted prices to always exceed full cost) lead to significant economic loss.

This laboratory market study examines the potential effect of increasing auditors' liability on firms' new investments. The experimental hypotheses are derived from Shibano's 2000 model, which predicts that an increase in auditors' liability will decrease the frequency of audit failures and may decrease firms' new investments if the liability level is “excessive”. Results from three experimental market settings (with low, medium, and high liability levels) suggest two major conclusions. First, firms' new investments increase significantly when auditors' liability level increases from low to medium, and decrease significantly as the liability level increases from medium to high. This result provides support for the argument that adequate auditor liability is necessary to motivate firms to invest in new projects. Excessive liability, however, may discourage firms from making new investments. Second, the frequency of audit failure decreases insignificantly when auditors' liability increases. These two results have an important policy implication: the benefit of imposing high liability on the auditor (i.e., an insignificant decrease in audit failure) may be more than offset by its cost (i.e., a significant decrease in new investments).

In this paper we seek to document errors that could affect studies of earnings management. The book income adjustment (BIA) of the alternative minimum tax (AMT) created apparently strong incentives to manage book income downward in 1987. Five earlier papers using different methodologies and samples all conclude that earnings were reduced in response to the BIA. This consensus of findings offers an opportunity to investigate our speculation that methodological biases are more likely when there appear to be clear incentives for earnings management. A reexamination of these studies uncovers potential biases related to a variety of factors, including choices of scaling variables, selection of affected and control samples, and measurement error in estimated discretionary accruals. A reexamination of the argument underlying these studies also suggests that the incentives to manage earnings are less powerful than initially predicted, and are partially mitigated by tax and non-tax factors. As a result, we believe that the extent of earnings management that occurred in 1987 in response to the BIA remains an unresolved issue.

This laboratory market study examines the potential effect of increasing auditors' liability on firms' new investments. The experimental hypotheses are derived from Shibano's 2000 model, which predicts that an increase in auditors' liability will decrease the frequency of audit failures and may decrease firms' new investments if the liability level is “excessive”. Results from three experimental market settings (with low, medium, and high liability levels) suggest two major conclusions. First, firms' new investments increase significantly when auditors' liability level increases from low to medium, and decrease significantly as the liability level increases from medium to high. This result provides support for the argument that adequate auditor liability is necessary to motivate firms to invest in new projects. Excessive liability, however, may discourage firms from making new investments. Second, the frequency of audit failure decreases insignificantly when auditors' liability increases. These two results have an important policy implication: the benefit of imposing high liability on the auditor (i.e., an insignificant decrease in audit failure) may be more than offset by its cost (i.e., a significant decrease in new investments).

This paper reports the results of an experiment that investigates how external audit planning is affected when internal auditors have incentives and the opportunity to bias their evaluations. Specifically, we draw on attribution theory to examine how internal auditor eligibility for incentive compensation and participation in consulting (i.e., two factors that provide incentives to bias audit evaluations) affect external audit planning. In addition, we examine the effects of incentive compensation and a consulting role across two routine internal audit tasks — an objective tests of controls task and a subjective inventory valuation task — to evaluate whether their effects are contingent upon task subjectivity (i.e., opportunity to bias audit evaluations). Seventy-six external auditors from four Big 5 public accounting firms participated in an experiment that manipulated internal auditor compensation (fixed salary versus incentive compensation), the type of work that the internal auditors routinely perform (primarily auditing versus primarily consulting), and audit task subjectivity (objective tests of controls versus subjective inventory valuation). Our results suggest that the nature of internal auditors' compensation and work affect audit planning recommendations differently. The opportunity to receive incentive compensation results in less reliance on internal auditors' work and greater budgeted audit hours, but only for the subjective task. Although a consulting role decreases perceived internal auditor objectivity, it has a limited effect on planning recommendations. Specifically, consulting has no effect on reliance, and leads to greater budgeted audit hours only when incentive compensation is available. We discuss potential explanations for the results as well as implications for audit research, practice, and regulation.

A claim is commonly made that cash flow and accrual accounting methods for valuing equities must always yield equivalent valuations. A recent paper by Lundholm and O'Keefe 2001, for example, claims that, because of this equivalence, there is nothing to be learned from empirical comparison of valuation models. So they dismiss recent research that has shown that accrual accounting residual income models and earnings capitalization models perform, over a range of conditions, better than cash flow or dividend discount models. This paper demonstrates, with examples, that the claim is misguided. Practice inevitably involves forecasting over finite, truncated horizons, and the accounting specified in a model — cash versus accrual accounting in particular — is pertinent to valuation with finite-horizon forecasting. Indeed, the issue of choosing a valuation model is an issue of specifying pro forma accounting, and so, for finite-horizon forecasts, one cannot be indifferent to the accounting.

This paper investigates how the initial conclusion reached by the preparer of audit workpapers and the manner with which the preparer structures the associated evidence can influence the reviewer's judgement in an audit setting. We conducted an experiment in which auditors reviewed the work of a preparer who had concluded that the account of the client's major customer was either collectible or not collectible. The preparer's memo was structured in a neutral manner or stylized to emphasize (de‐emphasize) evidence consistent (inconsistent) with the preparer's conclusion. Results showed that reviewers placed less reliance on the conclusions reached by the preparer when the preparer's memo was stylized than when the memo was structured in a neutral manner. These results suggest that reviewers are sensitive to stylization attempts by preparers. Implications of the paper are discussed.

This paper revisits Ohlson 1995 to make a number of points not generally appreciated in the literature. First, the residual income valuation (RIV) model does not serve as a crucial centerpiece in the analysis. Instead, RIV plays the role of condensing and streamlining the analysis, but without any effect on the substantive empirical conclusions. Second, the concept of "other information" in the model can be given concrete empirical content if one presumes that next-period expected earnings are observable.