The AICPA Special Committee on Financial Reporting has urged disclosure of relevant forward‐looking information on risks and opportunities to supplement conventional financial statements. We conduct a laboratory market experiment to assess the effects of such disclosures on capital allocation decisions. We develop two sets of competing hypotheses regarding how capital markets react to supplemental disclosures. One set is based on the assumption of semi‐strong market efficiency, while the other posits that the bounded rationality of individual traders leads to inefficient market prices. We find that explicit disclosure of management’s best estimate of an uncertain quantity improves market efficiency, even though this disclosure is redundant with information in financial statements. Second, we find disclosure of an upper bound of management’s estimate has the potential to bias security prices upward, while informationally equivalent disclosure of both upper and lower bounds removes this bias. These results suggest that experimental market reactions to these supplemental disclosures are inconsistent with market efficiency. Supplemental analyses of individuals’ price predictions and trading behavior support our conclusion that inefficiencies are at least partially attributable to individual information processing biases.

We examine whether tax incentives influence where U.S. multinationals locate their interest deductions worldwide. Our sample includes international bond offerings by U.S. multinationals during 1987–1997 denominated in the currencies of Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, or the United Kingdom. Our results suggest that U.S. multinationals’ debt location decisions take into account the effect of jurisdiction‐specific tax‐loss carryforwards and binding foreign tax credit limitations on the value of debt tax shields. Our results are also consistent with U.S. multinationals locating interest deductions in different tax jurisdictions as a mechanism to achieve tax‐motivated income shifting.

This paper examines the association between external monitoring and earnings management by property‐casualty insurers. We extend previous work by Petroni and Beasley (1996) by expanding the set of external monitors to include both auditors and actuaries. We investigate whether certain auditor‐actuary pairs are associated with less understatement of the loss reserve account by financially struggling insurers. Our data consist of loss adjustments reported by 465 property‐casualty insurers for reserves established in 1993. The results indicate that under‐reserving by weak insurers is essentially eliminated when the firm uses auditors and actuaries that are both from Big Six accounting firms. In contrast, non‐Big Six actuaries have less impact on under‐reserving by weak insurers. Our results suggest that the quality usually associated with Big Six auditors falls when the audit firm relies on third party actuaries to evaluate the loss reserve estimates of struggling insurance clients. We conjecture that Big Six actuaries insist on more conservative loss reserve levels because, compared to actuarial consulting firms, they are more attuned to the liability exposure of the auditor.

Despite extensive research on the determinants of external audit fees, there is little empirical evidence on the effect of internal audit contribution on the external audit fee. Using a cross‐sectional regression model based on prior audit fee research, this study provides evidence that internal audit contribution is a significant determinant of the external audit fee. Further, a second model that provides evidence on the determinants of internal audit contribution is developed and tested. This second model indicates that internal audit contribution is influenced by internal audit quality and, conditional on the level of inherent risk, the availability of internal audit and the extent of coordination between internal and external auditors. These results are based on a unique data‐set comprised of publicly available data matched with survey responses from internal and external auditors affiliated with 70 non‐financial services Fortune 1000 firms. The sample includes all of the former “Big 6” international accounting firms and clients from twenty‐nine different industries.