Knowledge that Transforms

We examine the association between permissible non-audit services provided by auditors and the timeliness of earnings announcements. Although earnings announcements are unaudited, audit progress influences management’s ability to release earnings while maintaining confidence in reported results. We posit that non-audit services generate earnings announcement timeliness benefits by improving the efficiency and timing of audits through knowledge transfer. We find that tax non-audit services are associated with timelier earnings announcements while nontax non-audit services are not. These benefits are concentrated in the pre-regulatory period before changes in the mid-2000s. Following these changes, the association persists for firms with weaker information environments, poorer performance, and greater audit-related challenges. Overall, our findings show that auditor-provided tax services are associated with enhanced timeliness of unaudited disclosures and that these benefits vary across firms and over time, highlighting previously undocumented spillovers from non-audit services with implications for academic research and regulation.

We study the impact of an online market’s policy (environmental policy) offering entrepreneurs the option to disclose their environmental engagement on entrepreneurship outcomes, using Kickstarter as a laboratory. Following the policy’s implementation, 32.4% of entrepreneurs opted to disclose their environmental commitments. Using the passage of the environmental policy as an instrument, we show that environmental commitment improves funding outcomes, with the funding success rate increasing by 13.2% and the pledged funding ratio by 8.7%. Environmental commitment also attracts more environmentally conscious backers and brings in new backers, which likely contributes to these improved outcomes. However, environmental commitment does not have a material impact on the ultimate project success rate and significantly delays project delivery. Overall, the evidence suggests that Kickstarter’s nudge policy encourages entrepreneurs’ environmental engagement and helps them expand access to environmentally conscious backers by internalizing backers’ environmental preferences.

We propose a framework to assess the decision-usefulness of heterogeneous disclosure practices that managers use to convey information to market participants. We illustrate an application of our framework to non-GAAP earnings, management earnings guidance, and earnings conference calls. We first identify key quality attributes for each disclosure practice and then develop a list of quality metrics that we apply to a small pilot sample. We focus on metrics that are easily measured in real time and discuss the practical challenges of conducting assessments of disclosure quality at the firm-quarter-disclosure level. Our descriptive analysis provides preliminary insights into whether and how voluntary disclosure quality varies across firms and highlights the interconnectedness of these disclosure practices. We discuss future research opportunities to expand and fine-tune the application of the framework to develop a comprehensive disclosure quality assessment.

We consider how images (i.e., photos but not graphs, charts, or infographics) in annual reports provide users with information and use machine-learning algorithms to assess their informativeness. We develop a metric of content reinforcement, defined as the degree to which information investors extract from images complements and reinforces details in textual narratives. We find that firms are more likely to use images when they experience greater asset growth, have greater business complexity, and provide less readable textual disclosures—suggesting images are used more often when information processing costs are high. Our main results indicate that increases in visual prevalence and the extent to which images reinforce text are associated with greater analyst forecast accuracy and lower dispersion, suggesting that images improve users’ information processing. Firms also increase image use after an exogenous decline in analyst coverage. Overall, firms use images when their information environment is poorer, and visual informativeness facilitates information assimilation.

This study examines the determinants and implications of the volume of tax-related numbers reported in the financial statements. I document that the volume of tax numbers increases with tax reporting requirements and decreases with the complexity of the tax rate, implying that firms with greater proprietary costs decrease their numeric disclosures once they meet mandatory reporting requirements. With respect to implications, I document that firms reporting more tax numbers improve the transparency of the information environment, reducing the errors and dispersion of analysts’ implied effective tax rate forecasts. In contrast, greater emphasis on narrative tax disclosure does not reduce information frictions, highlighting an important trade-off between numeric detail and strategic narratives. Further investigation suggests that this relationship is driven by more tax numbers in the financial statement footnotes rather than in the face financial statements. These findings suggest firms’ tax information environment improves with a greater volume of numeric tax-related disclosures.

We extract and describe corporate-issued guidance contained in over 23,000 LSEG Guidance Reports of S&P 1,500 firms from 2005 to 2021. Our sample contains 1.735 million Guidance Reports guidance instances that span over 180 guided items and fall into three broad categories: (1) qualitative topics, (2) consolidated financial statements, and (3) other key performance indicators. We identify research opportunities arising from Guidance Reports’ rich features, including quantitative or qualitative form, underpinning text, disclosure channels, and source speakers. We also compare Guidance Reports to the commonly used I/B/E/S Guidance database, which covers only quantitative guidance for 13 items. Approximately 1.494 million Guidance Reports instances fall outside I/B/E/S Guidance’s coverage, and even among overlapping items, only a subset is translated to I/B/E/S Guidance based on LSEG cost–benefit considerations. Our findings suggest researchers should be aware of the extent and nature of I/B/E/S Guidance omissions when studying guidance.

We examine the effect of private firm information dissemination on analysts’ forecast accuracy for public firms, utilizing the mandatory adoption of electronic business registers in EU countries as a (plausibly) exogenous shock. Our findings reveal a significant improvement in analysts’ earnings forecast accuracy following the registers’ implementation that enhanced private firms’ information dissemination, indicating positive information spillovers to public firms. This effect strengthens (i) when private firm disclosures are timelier within the context of the focal public firm’s fiscal year and (ii) when the focal public firm has private firm suppliers, customers, or competitors. However, increased transparency of private firms also reduces analysts’ incentives to cover public firms, as investor attention shifts from public to private firms. This countervailing force negatively impacts analyst forecast accuracy, partially offsetting the positive effects from information spillovers.

Despite the rapid growth of podcasts as a source of investment information, we know little about their potential capital market effects. We find that the release of podcasts that provide listeners with firm-specific investment analysis is associated with significant increases in trading activity, particularly among retail investors. When released following earnings announcements, investing podcasts appear to provide information to less-informed investors that helps them better process the news, as podcast discussion is associated with reductions in information asymmetry. This effect is stronger for podcasts that include guests, have greater narrative distinctiveness across speakers, convey information more rapidly, and focus more on fundamental analysis. Podcast discussion is also associated with faster price formation and heightened earnings response coefficients, with no evidence of return reversals. Overall, our results are consistent with investing podcasts helping investors to better process information and provide novel evidence on how this emerging technology impacts capital markets.

This paper analyzes the impact of the Sarbanes–Oxley (SOX) Act on individuals’ decisions to invest their human capital in regulatory compliance. Exploiting geographic variation in SOX-induced growth in the demand for accounting labor and rich survey data on college students, we find that freshmen from regions with greater public company presence exhibit a more marked increase in the propensity to major in accounting after the enactment of SOX. Consistent with the financial incentives mechanism, we find that students respond more to SOX when they have stronger pecuniary preferences, when they are better positioned to seize the financial rewards of accounting, and when they have better access to information about SOX-induced changes in monetary returns to the accounting major. Finally, regions with greater public company presence exhibit larger increases in local wages and employment in the accounting industry.