This paper investigates whether the business press serves as an information intermediary. The press potentially shapes firms' information environments by packaging and disseminating information, as well as by creating new information through journalism activities. We find that greater press coverage reduces information asymmetry (i.e., lower spreads and greater depth) around earnings announcements, with broad dissemination of information having a bigger impact than the quantity or quality of press‐generated information. These results are robust to controlling for firm‐initiated disclosures, market reactions to the announcement, and other information intermediaries. Our findings suggest that the press helps reduce information problems around earnings announcements.

The test developed in Mishkin [1983] (hereafter, MT) is widely used to test the rational pricing of accounting numbers. However, contrary to the perception in the accounting literature, the exclusion of variables from the MT's forecasting and pricing equations leads to an omitted variables problem that affects inferences about the rational pricing of accounting variables. Only if the omitted variables are rationally priced is their exclusion irrelevant. Failure to recognize this issue leads accounting researchers to employ the MT without appreciating how omitted variables affect the inferences they draw. We demonstrate that when additional explanatory variables are included in the MT, the rational pricing of accruals is not rejected. That is, the accrual anomaly documented in Sloan [1996] vanishes when additional explanatory variables are incorporated into the MT. We also show that in accounting research settings, where samples are large, ordinary least squares (OLS) is equivalent to the MT. As a result, accounting researchers should consider using OLS or be more explicit about the exact advantages of the MT over OLS in their research setting.

This study examines the relation between analysts' incentives to cover firms and the extent of their intangible assets. Because intangible assets typically are unrecognized and estimates of their fair values are not disclosed, absent analyst coverage firms with more intangible assets likely have less informative prices. Accordingly, we expect analysts have greater incentives to cover firms with more intangible assets and, thus, predict they have higher analyst coverage. As predicted, we find that analyst coverage is significantly greater for firms with larger research and development and advertising expenses relative to their industry, and for firms in industries with larger research and development expense. We also predict and find that analyst coverage is increasing in firm size, growth, trading volume, equity issuance, and perceived mispricing, and is decreasing in the size of the firm's analysts' brokerage houses and the effort analysts expend to follow the firm. These findings indicate that analyst coverage depends on private benefits and costs of covering a firm. We also test hypotheses related to analyst effort. We predict and find that analysts expend greater effort to follow firms with more intangible assets, after controlling for other factors associated with analyst effort. Our evidence indicates that intangible assets, most of which are not recognized in firms' financial statements, are associated with greater incentives for analysts to cover such firms, and greater costs of coverage. An open question is whether financial statement recognition of intangible assets could more efficiently provide information about such assets to investors.

We study the role of a relatively new type of external firm monitor, an on‐site government‐appointed Corporate Monitor, and assess whether such appointments reduce firms' propensity to violate laws. Using a sample of deferred and nonprosecution agreements, we first document the determinants of Monitor appointment. We find firms that voluntarily disclose wrongdoing and have more independent directors are less likely to have Corporate Monitors, whereas those with more severe infractions, mandated board changes, and increased cooperation requirements are more likely to have Monitors. We find such appointments are associated with an 18%–25% reduction in violations while the Monitor is on site, however, the effect does not persist after the Monitorship ends. Using a semisupervised machine learning method to measure changes in firms' ethics and compliance norms, we find that the reduction in violations is associated with changes in ethics and compliance that also do not persist. Finally, we document that firms under Monitorship experience a persistent reduction in innovation, highlighting a previously unexplored cost of these interventions. Overall, our results suggest that, although Corporate Monitors on site are associated with fewer violations, firms revert to previous levels of violations following Monitors' departure.

Financial statement fraud generates many negative effects, including reducing people's willingness to participate in the stock market. If it also stigmatizes accounting, it may similarly adversely affect the quantity and quality of workers willing to become accountants, thereby potentially creating negative effects for years to come. We examine the impact of fraud on the labor force entering the accounting profession, which is a key input into the production of accounting information (i.e., the output). Using data describing millions of college students across the United States, we find incoming students are actually more likely to major in accounting when local frauds occur during their formative years. These students are also more likely to have attributes desired by the accounting profession (e.g., high academic aptitude) and are more likely to subsequently serve in public accounting and become Certified Public Accountants. In the context of other fields (i.e., all college majors), we find that fraud similarly spurs interest in other business disciplines, but not in majors outside of business schools. Those attracted to other business disciplines, however, generally possess different traits. Specifically, students entering accounting are distinctively more likely to exhibit values espoused by the accounting profession, including a predisposition to public service and less commercial orientation. Thus, nonpecuniary motives appear to uniquely drive accounting student enrollment following fraud. Collectively, our findings suggest that, while fraud is unmistakably bad, it appears to have the positive unintended consequence of attracting labor into business disciplines and, in accounting, increasing the prevalence of desirable traits among entrants.

This paper investigates whether greater competition increases or decreases individual bank and banking system risk. Using a new text‐based measure of competition, and an instrumental variables analysis that exploits exogenous variation in bank deregulation, we provide robust evidence that greater competition increases both individual bank risk and a bank's contribution to system‐wide risk. Specifically, we find that higher competition is associated with lower underwriting standards, less timely loan loss recognition, and a shift toward noninterest revenue. Further, we find that higher competition is associated with higher stand‐alone risk of individual banks, greater sensitivity of a bank's downside equity risk to system‐wide distress, and a greater contribution by individual banks to downside risk of the banking sector.

We examine how worker productivity differs when compensation is based on quantity, creativity, or the product of both measures. In an experiment in which participants design “rebus puzzles,” we find that combining quantity and creativity measures in a creativity‐weighted pay scheme results in creativity‐weighted productivity scores that are significantly lower than those generated by participants with quantity incentives alone. Follow‐up analysis indicates that relative to participants in the quantity‐only condition, participants in the creativity‐weighted condition produce approximately the same number of high‐creativity puzzles, but produce significantly fewer puzzles overall. Thus, while participants rewarded for creativity‐weighted output tend to restrict their production to high‐creativity efforts, they are unable to translate this focus into a greater volume of high‐creativity output. Implications address a possible explanation for firms' reluctance to incorporate creativity measures within multidimensional performance measurement systems, notwithstanding published suggestions to do so.

We examine whether application of International Accounting Standards (IAS) is associated with higher accounting quality. The application of IAS reflects combined effects of features of the financial reporting system, including standards, their interpretation, enforcement, and litigation. We find that firms applying IAS from 21 countries generally evidence less earnings management, more timely loss recognition, and more value relevance of accounting amounts than do matched sample firms applying non‐U.S. domestic standards. Differences in accounting quality between the two groups of firms in the period before the IAS firms adopt IAS do not account for the postadoption differences. Firms applying IAS generally evidence an improvement in accounting quality between the pre‐ and postadoption periods. Although we cannot be sure our findings are attributable to the change in the financial reporting system rather than to changes in firms' incentives and the economic environment, we include research design features to mitigate effects of both.

We examine whether analysts' incentives to maintain good relationships with management contribute to the optimistic/pessimistic within‐period time trend in analysts' forecasts. In our experiments, 81 experienced sell‐side analysts from two brokerage firms predict earnings based on historical information and management guidance. Analysts' forecasts exhibit an optimistic/pessimistic pattern across the two timing conditions (early and late in the quarter), and the effect is significantly stronger when the analysts have a good relationship with management than when their only incentive is to be accurate. Debriefing results indicate that analysts are aware of this pattern of forecasts, and believe that this benefits their future relationships with management and with brokerage clients. The analysts most frequently cite favored conference call participation and information access when describing benefits from maintaining good relationships with management. Our results suggest the following: The optimistic/pessimistic pattern in forecasts is in part a conscious response to relationship incentives, information access is perceived to be a major benefit of management relationships, and recent regulatory changes may have lessened but have not eliminated this conflict of interest source.

We investigate whether management's decision regarding the recognition of the valuation allowance (VA) for deferred tax assets provides incremental information about the persistence of accounting losses. We introduce a classification scheme that assigns loss firm‐years into three categories based on whether management appears to have recognized a material change in the VA, and whether or not the firm has positive taxable income (e.g., a net operating loss). The results of our study show that our tax categories contain information about the persistence of accounting losses over the following three years beyond variables previously identified to predict loss persistence. This incremental information is consistent with management using private information about the firm's future prospects in setting the VA. Finally, we find that investors’ pricing of the VA varies with the saliency of the tax signal and the information environment of the firm.