Knowledge that Transforms

We use the Ohlson (1995, 1999) and Feltham and Ohlson (1999) valuation models to investigate the market's perception of the economic effect of employee stock options (ESOs) on firm value for a sample of 85 profitable computer software companies. Our results suggest that the market appears to value these firms' ESO expense not as an expense but as an intangible asset (even after controlling for the endogeneity bias arising from the mechanical relation between ESOs and the underlying stock prices). However, we also find a conflict between: (1) the positive manner in which investors appear to value ESO expense, and (2) the negative relation between current ESO expense and future abnormal earnings. This conflict not only could be an artifact of the restrictiveness of the abnormal earnings forecasting equation we estimate, but it also calls into question whether investors assess correctly the effect of ESOs on profitable software firm value.

We examine how tax legislation that restricted firms' deductions of CEO compensation above $1 million reduced the implicit contracting cost of compensation for firms that were expected to pay below that amount and that were not directly affected by the law change. We find that firms that expected to pay their CEOs less than $1 million actually increased their CEOs' cash compensation, contrary to Congress's expectations. Moreover, the magnitude of the unexpected increase in compensation is proportional to how far the CEO's expected compensation fell below Congress's new $1 million reasonable-compensation standard. Thus, our study provides evidence that some of the largest U.S. corporations responded in a manner contrary to policymakers' expectations. Our findings also support the theory of implicit contracting costs, by demonstrating that many firms reacted in an economically rational fashion when a change in the tax law decreased their implicit costs of CEO compensation.

Top management faces two key organizational design choices: (1) how much authority to delegate to lower-level managers, and (2) how to design incentive compensation to ensure that these managers do not misuse their discretion. Theoretical accounting literature emphasizes that top management makes these two choices jointly, but there is little empirical evidence on this assertion. Capitalizing on a unique database of branch manager practices in retail banks, this study provides some of the first evidence on the joint nature of the delegation and incentive compensation choices for lower-level managers. A simultaneous model of these two choices indicates that high-growth, volatile, and innovative banks delegate more authority to branch managers. In turn, branch managers with more authority receive more incentive-based pay. However, in contrast with principal-agent theory, I find no evidence that the extent of incentive compensation plays a significant role in explaining the extent of delegation.

Empirical research provides scant evidence that just-in-time (JIT) adopters outperform their non-adopting industry peers. Using a sample of 201 JIT adopters and matched non-adopters, we examine the relation between financial performance and JIT. Our sample-wide results indicate that JIT adopters improve financial performance relative to non-adopters, and that profit margin, rather than asset turnover, is the primary source of such improvement. However, results of additional analyses suggest that JIT adopters below a firm-size threshold do not improve financial performance, a finding that reconciles our study to Balakrishnan et al. (1996), which examined a JIT adopter sample that included a greater proportion of small firms.

We investigate the effect of an increase in the individual (shareholder-level) income tax rate on share values. We regress cumulative daily abnormal stock returns surrounding the passage of the Revenue Reconciliation Act of 1993 on firm dividend yield, tax status of the investor as represented by level of institutional ownership, the interaction of these two variables, and control variables. Consistent with our expectations, we find that (1) the higher the firm's dividend yield, the more negative the firm's stock price reaction to the increase in the individual income tax rate (i.e., the dividend tax rate) enacted in the Revenue Reconciliation Act of 1993, and (2) institutional holdings mitigate this negative reaction. Our results suggest that both the dividend policy of the firm and the tax status of the marginal investor influence the extent to which dividend taxes are reflected in share values. Our evidence is consistent with the traditional view that firm dividend policy influences the extent to which tax rate changes affect share values.

This paper provides empirical evidence that audit committee independence is associated with economic factors. I find that audit committee independence increases with board size and board independence and decreases with the firm's growth opportunities and for firms that report consecutive losses. In contrast, no relation is found between audit committee independence and creditors' demand for accounting information. Although the analyses are based on data from 1991 to 1993, these results have implications for NYSE and NASDAQ listing requirements for audit committees adopted in December 1999. Specifically, the new requirements give firms the option of including non-outside directors on their audit committees if it is in the best interests of the firm to do so.

Using both a market-based and an accrual-based measure of conservatism, we find that firms facing more severe conflicts over dividend policy tend to use more conservative accounting. Furthermore, we document that accounting conservatism is associated with a lower cost of debt after controlling for other determinants of firms' debt costs. Our collective evidence is consistent with the notion that accounting conservatism plays an important role in mitigating bondholder-shareholder conflicts over dividend policy, and in reducing firms' debt costs.

With the current shift toward real-time audit review, subordinates become aware of supervisors' views earlier in the audit process. I use an experiment to examine whether earlier knowledge of supervisors' views increases subordinates' tendencies to agree with those views because subordinates predecisionally distort evidence. In a going-concern task, I find that auditors who learn the partner's view before evaluating evidence (1) evaluate individual evidence items as more consistent with the partner's view, and (2) make going-concern judgments that are more consistent with the partner's view, than do auditors who learn the same partner's view after evaluating evidence. In a second experiment, I examine whether auditors anticipate the distortion's effect on subordinates' judgments. I find that auditors expect subordinates to make judgments that agree with supervisors' views, but auditors do not expect subordinates to agree even more with those views when subordinates learn those views earlier in the audit process.

We provide evidence that CEOs' and lower-level business unit executives' target bonuses are negatively associated with a proxy for measurement noise in accounting-based performance measures, and positively associated with proxies for firms' growth opportunities and the extent of executives' decision-making authority. Non-CEO executives' target bonuses are also positively associated with their CEO's target bonus. In addition, we compare executives' actual and target bonuses over two consecutive periods to draw inferences about how firms revise executives' performance standards. If firms adjust performance standards to fully reflect executives' past performance, then we expect an executive's chances of earning an above-target bonus to be independent of his past performance. We find evidence to the contrary; an executive is more likely to receive an above-target bonus if he received an above-target bonus in the prior year than if he did not. This suggests that firms do not adjust standards to fully reflect executives' past performance, consistent with agency-theoretic arguments that a firm can better motivate its executives if it discounts executives' past performance in setting their future compensation.

This paper investigates three potential explanations for the puzzlingly weak value relevance of oil and gas asset present values documented in prior research: measurement error, model misspecification, and time-period idiosyncrasy. I operationally define the magnitude of measurement error as the measurement error variance, estimated using an errors-in-variables two-stage regression model similar to that used by Barth (1991) and Choi et al. (1997). I find that (1) measurement error in the present value measure of oil and gas assets is on average less than the measurement error in the historical cost asset measure; (2) oil and gas assets measured at present value explain significantly more across-firm and across-time variation in stock prices than do oil and gas assets measured at historical cost; and (3) model misspecification partially accounts for the puzzlingly weak reported value relevance of the present value measure in prior research.