Knowledge that Transforms

manuscripts in process at the beginning of the year, plus new submissions, plus resubmissions).In general, this number has grown along with the increase in submissions.Column (e) of Table 1 reports the number of decision letters issued each year. 2 Commensurate with the increase in new submissions during 2018 reported in column (b) and the modest decrease in resubmissions reported in column (c), column (e) shows that the number of decision letters grew by 5.5% in 2018, from 1,113 to 1,174.Thus, driven by the growth in submissions in recent years, the number of submission letters by TAR editors also is at historically high levels.

Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Search Site Cite View This Citation Add to Citation Manager Citation Feng Gu; Capitalism without Capital. The Accounting Review 1 July 2018; 93 (4): 359–363. https://doi.org/10.2308/accr-10586 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentThe Accounting Review Search Advanced Search

ABSTRACT 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.

ABSTRACT 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.

ABSTRACT 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. JEL Classifications: G14; G38; M10; M21; M41.

ABSTRACT We examine whether the use of fair value measurement (FVM) for bank assets reduces information asymmetry among equity investors (bid-ask spread) and how this is affected by the recognition of own credit risk gains and losses (OCR). Our findings show that FVM of assets is associated with noticeably lower information asymmetry, and that this reduction is more than twice as large when banks also recognize OCR. In addition, we find that the bid-ask spread is incrementally lower for banks that provide more detailed narrative disclosures on OCR. The findings also indicate that the effects of asset FVM and OCR recognition on the bid-ask spread do not simply capture the differences in the characteristics of the banks and the quality of their information environments. Data Availability: All data are available from public sources.

ABSTRACT Experts have long conjectured that pension accounting rules, by which pension expense depends on a managerial estimate that is directly tied to the riskiness of plan assets (i.e., the expected rate of return, or ERR, on plan assets), encourage risk-taking with pension investments. The recent passage of IAS 19, Employee Benefits (Revised) (hereafter, IAS 19R) eliminates the ERR and replaces it with a managerial estimate unrelated to plan asset riskiness (the discount rate). We demonstrate that a sample of Canadian firms affected by IAS 19R reduces risk-taking in pension investments post-IAS 19R, compared to a control sample of U.S. firms unaffected by IAS 19R. Therefore, removing firms' ability to recognize immediately in net income the expected higher returns from risk-taking (via a higher ERR) reduces their propensity for that risk-taking—providing some of the first empirical evidence on the economic consequences of eliminating the ERR-based pension accounting model.

ABSTRACT The triangle model of responsibility (Schlenker, Britt, Pennington, Murphy, and Doherty 1994) predicts that the extent that investors hold management responsible for an adverse event is jointly determined by the links among three elements—management, the adverse event, and the relevant accounting regulations/standards or public norms. Applying this theory, we conduct experiments to examine how the locus of breach (external versus internal) moderates the efficacy of management's responsibility acceptance (higher versus lower). Our results show that management's higher (versus lower) responsibility acceptance is a more effective strategy in the presence of an external breach, but not in the presence of an internal breach (Experiment 1). Follow-up experiments suggest that this result is driven by the relative strength of the triangle links underlying the external versus internal breaches, rather than the locus per se. JEL Classifications: G40; M41. Data Availability: Contact the authors.

ABSTRACT We investigate whether issuers on negative credit watch manage earnings upward and whether such earnings management favorably influences the watch resolution. We find that rating, industry, and performance matched discretionary accruals reported during negative watch are significantly higher than their respective pre- and post-watch levels, after controlling for accrual reversal. Consistent with its opportunistic nature, we find that accrual management increases with issuers' incentives to avoid downgrade, and decreases with their earnings management constraints and the strength of the external monitoring. Surprisingly, such accrual management significantly increases the likelihood of a favorable resolution—issuers in the top half of the discretionary accruals distribution are 24 percent less likely to be downgraded than those in the propensity score matched bottom half. We find that issuers that avoid downgrades through income-increasing accrual management significantly underperform those that do not over the ensuing year, mitigating the signaling or measurement error explanations for our results. Finally, we find that accrual management does not reflect attempts to improve short-term credit quality. JEL Classifications: M41; G29; G38.