Knowledge that Transforms

A firm’s initial public offering (IPO) generates negative externalities for industry competitors. To mitigate this threat, incumbent firms manage their earnings downward, issue more negative management forecasts, and use a more negative disclosure tone when their industry peers file for an IPO. Negative accruals reverse when the threat subsides. Incumbents manage earnings more aggressively when costs are small and benefits are large, and when they follow negative disclosures of industry leading incumbents. Such strategic disclosure lowers incumbent firm valuation multiples and associates with more negative IPO firm media sentiment. IPO firms obtain lower offer prices, raise less capital, and are more likely to withdraw from the offering. They also invest less, hoard more cash, and experience lower profitability post-IPO, whereas incumbents experience higher profitability and market share growth. Our results highlight the role of strategic reporting on product market competition and identify a new cost of going public.

We test whether firms that exclude the effects of amortization from non-GAAP earnings allocate more of an acquisition’s purchase price to definite-lived intangible assets (DLIA). This strategy can yield two potential benefits: it can (1) increase non-GAAP earnings by shifting depreciation of tangible assets, which is often included in non-GAAP earnings, to amortization of DLIA, which non-GAAP earnings exclude, and (2) decrease the likelihood of future impairments by shifting allocations from goodwill to DLIA. Consistent with expectations, we find that non-GAAP-reporting firms that exclude amortization from non-GAAP earnings allocate more of the purchase price to DLIA. We also find that these firms allocate less of the purchase price to depreciable assets and goodwill. Finally, we document earnings surprise and valuation benefits related to these allocation choices. Overall, our results provide new evidence about non-GAAP reporting and purchase price allocations and suggest that non-GAAP reporting can influence management’s GAAP accounting choices. Data Availability: All data are publicly available from sources described in the paper.

This paper examines the influence of labor market power in the audit profession. Using a dataset of online job postings, we confirm that audit offices in more concentrated labor markets have greater labor market power and exercise it in the form of higher skill requirements and greater required effort from their auditors, at similar or slightly lower wages. We then show that client firms of audit offices in more concentrated labor markets are less likely to restate their earnings and have lower absolute discretionary accruals. These findings are only present when employees have lower mobility across professions and geographies, consistent with audit offices’ power in the local labor market explaining the results. Collectively, our findings highlight the importance of labor market power in understanding audit quality. Data Availability: Data are available from the sources cited in the text.

This study examines the performance target response to CEO overconfidence. Using unique hand-collected data on the annual bonus targets of Standard & Poor’s (S&P) 1500 firms, we find that boards ratchet targets more aggressively and apply greater ratcheting asymmetry for overconfident CEOs than for non-overconfident CEOs. These findings are robust to a battery of sensitivity tests. We also provide evidence that the increase in target ratcheting for overconfident CEOs is particularly more pronounced in firms with strong monitoring environments. Collectively, our findings suggest that boards actively consider CEOs’ overconfidence when setting performance targets, providing new insight into the importance of CEOs’ personal traits with respect to the incentive effects of performance target revisions.

Although the increase in non-GAAP earnings metrics has drawn unfavorable attention from regulators and standard setters, it can provide valuable experience for investors. We investigate whether experience with non-GAAP earnings metrics influences investors’ pricing of non-GAAP exclusions. We measure experience as the frequency with which managers or analysts provide non-GAAP earnings over the prior eight quarters and find that experience aids in the pricing of non-GAAP exclusions. Absent prior experience with non-GAAP earnings metrics, investors appear to overestimate the persistence of exclusions at the earnings announcement, which corrects in the following months. Cross-sectional tests suggest that experience facilitates investors’ pricing of non-GAAP exclusions by reducing their information processing costs.

This paper investigates whether and how firms receiving benefits through their connections to politicians use accounting discretion to mitigate the costs associated with negative publicity. I utilize a unique setting that captures the change in political costs arising from chairmanship appointments to influential U.S. Senate committees. Firms in the home state of a promoted officeholder often receive preferential treatment, drawing public scrutiny and incentivizing them to avoid reporting extreme earnings through income smoothing to reduce adverse political attention. Employing a difference-in-differences research design, I find evidence that home-state firms smooth their earnings throughout the officeholder’s tenure following a senator’s promotion to chairman or ranking minority member. Cross-sectional analyses demonstrate that these effects are stronger for firms anticipating higher political costs. Overall, this paper provides evidence of the political cost hypothesis, highlighting the role of political connections in shaping firms’ financial reporting strategies. Data Availability: Data are available from the public sources cited in the text.

The negative effects of common ownership on competition have received significant attention, but many proposed mechanisms for institutional investor influence seem implausible. We develop and test an analytical model of optimal compensation in an oligopoly with common ownership, focusing on revenue-based pay as a plausible channel through which institutional investors might influence competition. Our model implies a negative effect of common ownership on firms’ use of revenue-based pay. Using both associative analyses and an event study difference-in-differences design based on plausibly exogenous institutional mergers, we find no evidence of a negative relation between common ownership and the use of revenue-based pay, except in an economically small subsample of extremely concentrated owners. Results involving relative performance incentives are similar. Collectively, our results provide no support for the notion that cross-owning blockholders in general influence compensation contracts in order to soften executives’ incentives to compete aggressively. Data Availability: Data are available from the public sources cited in the text.

When determining new equity grants, corporate boards face a tradeoff between the CEO’s incentives generated from the grant’s duration versus those arising from the convexity of the embedded equity risk. We hypothesize and find that boards lengthen the horizon of new compensation grants in the presence of greater pre-existing compensation sensitivity to stock return volatility (vega). In addition, consistent with our hypothesis, we find stronger results in the presence of greater left-tail risk. Further, employing two exogenous shocks to left-tail risk, we provide evidence consistent with our hypothesis that grant horizons are related to risk incentives. Our analysis of the interaction of these two incentive mechanisms provides new insights on compensation contracting.

This paper evaluates the real effects of the new lease standard, ASC 842, on firms’ investment and operational outcomes. Using a sample of airline companies, we find that, subsequent to the promulgation of ASC 842 (2016–2018), public airlines reduce operating lease usage by about seven to ten percentage points relative to private airlines. The reduced lease usage is replaced by increased ownership, suggesting an equilibrium shift in firms’ investment due to changes in the cost-benefit tradeoffs associated with the operating lease classification. We also find evidence that the decline in lease usage hinders public airlines’ operational flexibility, as we observe more idle capacity in flights post-ASC 842. Facing excess capacity, public airlines seem to deploy their aircraft to shorter flying routes, raising the possibility of more wear and tear on the fleet. Overall, our evidence suggests that the new lease standard has intended and unintended real effects. Data Availability: Data are available from the public sources cited in the text.

We study the role of reporting systems in the context of bank runs. In our model, a bank receives an early but imprecise estimate of its investment performance, and its financial reporting system generates a report. We find that, from a financial-stability standpoint, the optimal reporting system requires full disclosure when the bank’s early estimate is below a certain threshold, but no disclosure otherwise. Importantly, such optimal reporting threshold should be tailored to the bank’s exposure to bank-run risk. In particular, the threshold is nonmonotonic and U-shaped in the bank-run risk. We also relate our results to current accounting standards and discuss their implications for policy-making and empirical research.