Knowledge that Transforms

We examine the relation between accounting conservatism and inside debt held by managers in the form of pension benefits and deferred compensation. We find that financial reporting is less conservative in firms whose CEOs hold more inside debt, particularly in firms with high default risk and agency costs of debt. This is consistent with our hypothesis that by aligning managerial incentives more closely with those of debtholders, inside debt reduces debtholders’ expropriation concerns and thus their demand for accounting conservatism. Our results are robust to identification strategies addressing the endogeneity of CEO inside debt and to alternative measures of accounting conservatism.

In multi‐task environments, the efficiency of aggregating managerial performance information and the degree of customization/standardization are closely related. Aggregation without information loss (i.e., statistically sufficient) requires at least as many measures as there are effective tasks (which arise through a task aggregation process analogous to that applied to homogeneous activities in activity‐based costing) and can be used uniformly for evaluation across similar jobs. Aggregation without economic loss (i.e., economically sufficient) can be achieved with a single performance measure but requires customization even across similar jobs. The main implication is that job complexity, the number of aggregate performance measures, and the degree of customization in performance measurement are interrelated. In particular, at the same level of performance measure aggregation, we predict highly customized performance evaluation in complex multi‐task jobs and standardized (uniform) performance evaluation only in simpler jobs with fewer tasks. We discuss additional empirical implications in the conclusion.

When subject matter experts are consulted during an audit, the quality of the expert's advice depends upon their ability to fully understand and incorporate client‐specific facts into their advice. Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (PCAOB) inspection reports suggest that auditors are neglecting to perform the required work to assess the quality of experts' recommendations. This study examines how characteristics of the audit, notably staffing decisions, can impede auditors' ability to discern advice quality. In an experiment, we examine how receiving advice of different levels of quality (lower or higher incorporation of relevant client facts) and awareness at the planning stage of the use of a subject matter expert (a priori aware or unaware) impacts auditors' effort, utilization of the advice, and judgment accuracy. We find that awareness of an expert being employed led to a social facilitation effect such that auditors who were a priori aware put forth more effort prior to receiving the expert advice and were initially in less agreement with management's aggressive revenue recognition position than auditors who were unaware. Upon receiving the expert advice, auditors who were a priori aware were more accurate than auditors who were unaware. These results should interest both audit regulators and practitioners by demonstrating how the timing and communication of consulting decisions affect auditors' assessments of advice received from subject matter experts.

Academics and practitioners have long recognized the importance of a firm's industry membership in explaining its financial performance. Yet, contrary to conventional wisdom, recent research shows that industry‐specific profitability forecasting models are not better than economy‐wide models. The objective of this paper is to further explore this result and to provide insights into when and why industry‐specific profitability forecasting models are useful. We show that industry‐specific forecasts are significantly more accurate in predicting profitability for single‐segment firms and, to some extent, for business segments. For multiple‐segment firms, the aggregation of segment‐level data for external reporting of firm‐level financials obliterates the industry effects of their segments.

In this paper, we evaluate the common assumption that European Union (EU) firms began using international financial reporting standards (IFRS) in 2005 when the EU formally adopted IFRS. Although the incidence of firms using local (or some other) GAAP declined between 2005 and 2012, it is still non‐trivial. By 2012 the incidence of non‐IFRS financial statements was still in excess of 17 percent (87 percent of which were fully consolidated). We estimate a model of the non‐adoption of IFRS as a function of implementation features of the IFRS regulation, country‐specific enforcement, and firm‐specific reporting incentives. As expected, being specifically required by EU‐wide and country‐specific rules to adopt IFRS is positively associated with IFRS adoption but does not constitute a complete explanation. Proxies for enforcement are significantly associated with non‐adoption, but the marginal effects of the enforcement variables are weak. We find that larger firms, firms with foreign operations and more analyst following, and firms that issue new debt and equity were more likely to adopt IFRS, both when the regulation was initially imposed and in subsequent years. We conclude that many EU firms do not use IFRS; that some firms exploited definitions, exemptions, and deferrals to avoid adopting IFRS while some firms simply failed to comply with the regulation; and that firms responded to their incentives in deciding whether to adopt IFRS.

This paper investigates whether a U.S. circuit court ruling that made it easier for public corporations to defend against security class actions led to more misreporting. In a difference‐in‐differences framework, I find an increase in restatements for firms affected by the ruling relative to unaffected firms. Furthermore, within affected firms, these results are concentrated among those that experienced the lowest abnormal returns in response to the ruling, the firms most likely to face meritorious litigation, and among those firms that saw decreases (increases) in dedicated (transient) institutional ownership after the ruling. Inferences are similar examining cross‐sectional tests in a levels framework. These results suggest that the threat of shareholder litigation can discipline managerial reporting practices and deter misreporting. As such, this evidence informs the debate about the role of securities class actions in regulating securities markets.

We examine whether initial loan sales in the secondary loan market relate to borrowing firms’ accounting conservatism. We find that borrowing firms exhibit a significant decline in accounting conservatism after the initial loan sales. We show that the decline in borrower conservatism is more pronounced for firms that borrow from lenders with lower monitoring incentives and for firms that have lower incentives to supply conservatism. The baseline results are robust to a battery of sensitivity tests. Collectively, we provide corroborative evidence that lead lenders’ monitoring incentives enforce accounting conservatism in the private debt market, and that lead lenders play a more prominent role than secondary loan market participants in shaping corporate (conservative) reporting.

This study examines whether and when real earnings smoothing influences firm‐specific stock price crash risk. Using a sample of U.S. public firms for the years 1993 through 2014, we find real earnings smoothing to be positively associated with firm‐specific stock price crash risk. This finding is consistent with the view that real earnings smoothing helps managers withhold bad news, keep poor‐performing projects, conceal resource diversion, and engage in ineffective risk management, which increases crash risk. Further, we find a stronger relation between crash risk and real earnings smoothing when firm uncertainty is higher, product market competition is lower, and balance sheet constraint is higher. Overall, our study suggests that real earnings smoothing destroys shareholder value in that it increases stock price crash risk.

When targets depend on past performance, incentives are adversely affected by the ratchet effect. We provide theory and evidence that incorporating past peer performance into targets can alleviate this adverse incentive effect. In particular, we present an analytical model that characterizes optimal target revisions as a function of past own and past peer performance. We then test the predictions of our model using data on 2008–2010 performance targets from 354 units of a governmental agency responsible for reintegration of the long‐term unemployed into the labor market. As a unique feature of our data, we have information on peer group quality, defined as the extent to which peer performance is informative about common shocks. Consistent with our model, we find that higher peer group quality (a) increases sensitivity of target revisions to past peer performance, (b) reduces sensitivity of target revisions to past own performance, and (c) reduces the ratchet effect as reflected in managerial incentives to withhold end‐of‐year effort.