Knowledge that Transforms

My vision is that by 2036 accounting is known as the learned profession that provides information for informed decision-making to support a prosperous society. By 2036, academic and practicing accountants view themselves as part of the same profession, and practicing accountants look to academics to develop knowledge relevant to identifying information—and its characteristics—useful in informing decisions. In sum, insights from research are instrumental in shaping accounting in practice. To achieve this vision, academics need to (1) conduct fundamental and applied research; (2) communicate research insights outside of academia; (3) interact with practicing accountants and others who use accounting information, such as managers, capital providers, regulators, and government officials; and (4) ensure that everyone understands that academic accountants are responsible for the “learned” part of accounting as a learned profession.

Often, firms reveal oversights and bad decisions publicly through their financial reporting (for instance, restating earnings, impairing goodwill, etc.). These “confessions,” which usually lead to immediate reputation losses, may be attributed to attempts to be perceived as transparent or to attempts to avoid likely litigation costs. In this paper, however, we argue that reputational concerns about perceived ability alone can provide firms with strong enough incentives to confess their mistakes, even in the absence of other non-reputational disciplinary mechanisms. Analyzing the repeated interaction between a firm and an external evaluator who may detect the firm's mistakes, we show that, in equilibrium, a confession places the firm under higher future scrutiny, which is more costly for lower-quality firms. Consequently, in equilibrium, higher-quality firms confess mistakes more often.

We examine whether firms use social media to strategically disseminate financial information. Analyzing S&P 1500 firms' use of Twitter to disseminate quarterly earnings announcements, we find that firms are less likely to disseminate when the news is bad and when the magnitude of the bad news is worse, consistent with strategic behavior. Furthermore, firms tend to send fewer earnings announcement tweets and “rehash” tweets when the news is bad. Cross-sectional analyses suggest that incentives for strategic dissemination are higher for firms with a lower level of investor sophistication and firms with a larger social media audience. We also find that strategic dissemination behavior is detectable in high litigation risk firms, but not low litigation risk firms. Finally, we find that the tweeting of bad news and the subsequent retweeting of that news by a firm's followers are associated with more negative news articles written about the firm by the traditional media, highlighting a potential downside to Twitter dissemination.