This paper examines the process that drives the formation and evolution of disclosure regulations. In equilibrium, changes in the regulation depend on the status quo, standard-setters’ political accountability and underlying objectives, and the cost and benefits of disclosure to reporting entities. Excessive political accountability need not implement the regulation preferred by diversified investors. Political pressures slow standard-setting and, if the standard-setter prefers high levels of disclosure, induce regulatory cycles characterized by long phases of increasing disclosure requirements followed by a sudden deregulation.

We provide an economics-based review of the pros and cons of ESG disclosures, emphasizing environmental disclosures from an investor-centric perspective. Our survey intends to guide corporate management and regulators in navigating the ESG disclosure terrain. Rather than summarizing the vast and growing ESG literature, we assess the economic arguments for ESG disclosure regulation and the form of this disclosure. We discuss investors’ demand for ESG information and its supply by publicly traded firms. We analyze the case for and against mandatory ESG disclosure. Finally, we weigh the efficiency of disclosure requirement characteristics, assuming mandatory ESG disclosure is warranted. We intend to be positive rather than prescriptive, providing a line of reasoning readers can employ to reach their own conclusions about what we ought to do.

This paper examines earnings management in response to changes in tax planning and financial reporting incentives around the corporate income tax rate decrease from 35% to 21% enacted by Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) of 2017. Given the higher level of book-tax conformity of real activities manipulation (RAM) relative to accrual-based earnings management (AEM), we hypothesize that firms concertedly use these techniques for different purposes. Specifically, we predict and find that firms use RAM to reduce taxable income prior to the TCJA with firms in our sample saving between $9.1 billion and $11.0 billion in taxes by shifting taxable income from the high-tax to the low-tax period. We also predict and find that firms use AEM, which has lower book-tax conformity than RAM, to simultaneously increase book income in the high-tax period. These results inform policymakers, regulators, and researchers on the economic effects of corporate tax reform.

This study examines the consequences of tax key audit matters (KAMs) to the valuation of tax attributes and to auditor-provided tax services (APTS). The literature finds that KAM adoption is not associated with investor or audit outcomes, creating an impetus to identify whether specific KAM topics are more consequential. Tax KAMs are an ideal setting because they are prevalent, taxes are economically important, and auditors can provide tax services to their clients. We find that investors discount the tax avoidance and deferred tax assets of tax-KAM companies, suggesting an incentive for managers to avoid tax KAMs. Consistent with self-interest threats to auditor independence, we find that receiving a tax KAM is negatively associated with clients’ concurrent purchases of APTS, but that clients increase their future purchases of these services when they stop receiving tax KAMs. These results reveal novel consequences of tax KAMs to the valuation of companies’ tax attributes and to APTS incentives.

The vast majority of managers’ earnings forecasts are issued concurrently (i.e., bundled) with their firm’s current earnings announcement. We document a predictable bias in these forecasts—the forecasts fail to fully reflect the persistence of the current earnings surprise. Specifically, we find that managers issue (1) optimistically biased forecasts alongside negative earnings surprises and (2) pessimistically biased forecasts alongside large positive earnings surprises. Bayesian updating implies this bias could be unintentional, but we find that the bias is stronger when managers have greater incentives and fewer constraints to issue biased forecasts, suggesting that, to some extent, the bias might be intentional. Relatedly, although managers typically have better information about their firm’s earnings than analysts, we show that analyst reliance on these biased management forecasts represents a mechanism (and an alternative interpretation) for a similar analyst underreaction to current earnings attributed in the literature to analysts’ cognitive bias. We also find that, on average, investors do not appear to initially understand the bias in these forecasts but do unravel it over longer windows. However, investors more quickly unravel the bias when the manager has a history of issuing biased forecasts and when the firm has more sophisticated investors. Overall, we document that managers’ forecasts appear to repeatedly underweight the persistence of current earnings surprises, are biased in ways that improve investors’ perceptions of managers’ ability, and that this behavior concentrates in subsamples where outsiders have a harder time recognizing any bias.

We examine the association between CEO birthplace proximity and financial misconduct. We find that CEOs managing firms near their birthplaces (home CEOs) are associated with less financial misconduct compared to other CEOs. This association is not attributable to differences in corporate governance. The relationship strengthens in areas with a strong local investment presence and greater religious commitment as well as among CEOs with longer tenures in their home state. Our findings are robust to addressing potential selection and omitted variable biases as well as to conducting multiple robustness tests, including analyses of involuntary CEO changes and headquarters relocations. We also find a similar association for CFOs, with firms employing home CFOs exhibiting less financial misconduct.