Knowledge that Transforms

Using the market values of audit partners’ houses as a measure of their personal wealth, we find that wealthier U.S. partners provide higher-quality audits, as evidenced by fewer material restatements, fewer material SEC comment letters, and higher audit fees. A battery of falsification tests shows that these findings are not driven by the matching of wealthier partners with clients with higher financial reporting quality. Our additional analyses suggest two explanations: greater personal wealth both incentivizes partners to exert more effort in delivering high-quality audits and reveals partners’ audit competence.

We examine the effects of local newspapers on firms’ information environments. With newspaper employment dropping precipitously in the last few decades, we posit that these changes will harm local firms’ information environments. Consistent with local news improving information environments, we find that volatility, spreads, and illiquidity increase as local newspaper intensity declines and that this is associated with firms’ importance in their local economy. We further find that for firms that are more important in their community, or have busy analysts, less local newspaper intensity is associated with significantly lower analyst accuracy and higher forecast dispersion. This is consistent with local newspapers improving information environments, even for sophisticated and likely remote information intermediaries. We also investigate how stakeholders respond to declines in local news and find that managers increase the amount of forward-looking disclosures while analysts increase coverage. These results provide insights into the methods by which stakeholders attempt to improve firms’ information environments when local news coverage fades.

This study examines the properties of innovation disclosures contained in new product announcements, a form of voluntary, nonfinancial disclosure. We analyze these properties using a novel, text-based measure of the extent of product innovation disclosed in new product announcements. We find that stock prices react more positively to announcements with more extensive innovation disclosure. In our main analyses, we first find that a higher level of innovation disclosure predicts a greater increase in future sales. We further find that this predictive ability falls when managers have stronger incentives to maximize their wealth and when the corporate governance structure and customers’ bargaining power weaken. Our research enhances the understanding of the properties of managerial voluntary, nonfinancial disclosures and contributes a text-based measure of innovation that captures managerial assessment of the extent of product innovation. This new measure is more generalizable and incrementally informative for firm value and future performance than conventional innovation measures that depend on the existence of patents or research and development expenses.