Knowledge that Transforms

This study examines the role of auditor industry expertise in the pricing of Big 5 audits in Australia. We test if the audit market prices an auditor's firm-wide industry expertise, or alternatively if the audit market only prices office-level expertise in those specific cities where the auditor is the industry leader. We document that there is an average premium of 24 percent associated with industry expertise when the auditor is both the city-specific industry leader and one of the top two firms nationally in the industry. However, the top two firms nationally do not earn a premium in cities where they are not city leaders. We further document that national leadership rankings are, in fact, driven by the specific offices where accounting firms are city leaders. Thus, the overall evidence supports that the market perception and pricing of industry expertise in Australia is primarily based on office-level industry leadership in city-specific audit markets.

This paper challenges the findings of Frankel et al. (2002) (FJN). The results of our discretionary accruals tests differ from FJN's when we adjust discretionary current accruals for firm performance. In our earnings benchmark tests, in contrast to FJN we find no statistically significant association between firms meeting analyst forecasts and auditor fees. Our market reaction tests also provide different results than those reported by FJN. Overall, our study indicates that FJN's results are sensitive to research design choices, and we find no systematic evidence supporting their claim that auditors violate their independence as a result of clients purchasing relatively more nonaudit services.

Das et al. (1998) suggest that as earnings become less predictable, analysts issue increasingly optimistic forecasts to please managers and consequently gain, or at least limit the loss of, access to managers' private information. We reexamine the association between earnings forecast error and earnings predictability because there is evidence suggesting that deliberate earnings forecast optimism is not an effective mechanism for gaining access to managers' information (e.g., Eames et al. 2002; Matsumoto 2002). We document associations between earnings level and both forecast error and earnings predictability. These associations suggest that earnings level may be an important control variable when examining the association between forecast error and earnings predictability. When we control for the level of earnings we find no significant association between forecast error and earnings predictability. Thus, we find no evidence that analysts intentionally issue optimistically biased earnings forecasts.

For a sample of companies traded on the Mexican Bolsa, fundamental analysis is used to investigate the value of financial statement information to investors after the December 1994 currency devaluation. Associations with contemporary returns show that earnings in the year of the devaluation lose value relevance, but fundamental signals, which incorporate the more detailed accounting information provided in financial statements, retain considerable explanatory power (R2 is 25 percent). After the devaluation, fundamental signals based on changes in selling and administrative expenses and changes in gross margin are significant in several analyses, including predictions of future earnings, analysts' forecast revisions, and analysts' forecast errors. Because analysts underutilize those signals, an opportunity exists after the devaluation for a substantial profit from a zero investment trading strategy.

One important role of audit committees is to protect external auditors from dismissal following the issuance of an unfavorable report. We examine auditor dismissals following new going-concern reports that Big 6 firms issued between 1988 and 1999. Our findings suggest that audit committees with greater independence, greater governance expertise, and lower stockholdings are more effective in shielding auditors from dismissal after the issuance of new going-concern reports. In addition, we find that the relation between audit committee independence and auditor protection from dismissal has grown stronger over time. Finally, independent audit committee members experience a significant increase in turnover rate after auditor dismissals. These findings, coupled with those from Carcello and Neal (2000), suggest that when affiliated directors dominate the audit committee, management often can (1) pressure its auditor to issue an unmodified report despite going-concern issues, and (2) dismiss its auditor if the auditor refuses to issue an unmodified report.

Prior research generally concludes that compensation committees completely shield executive compensation from the effect of restructuring charges on earnings. In contrast, we find that after controlling for the growth in annual inflation-adjusted CEO cash compensation, compensation committees only partially shield CEO compensation from the adverse effect of restructuring charges on earnings, on average. In further analyses, we identify factors associated with cross-sectional differences in the extent of shielding. Specifically, we find that compensation committees appear to: (1) completely shield initial and subsequent restructuring charges for CEOs with long tenure, provided that the firm had not recorded a charge in the two immediately prior years; (2) provide no shielding of subsequent restructuring charges taken by short-tenured CEOs if the firm reported a prior restructuring charge within two years of the current charge; (3) and partially shield the other categories of restructuring charges. Overall, this study provides evidence that compensation committees evaluate the context of each restructuring in determining the extent to which they will intervene to shield executive compensation from the effect of these charges.

An event study demonstrates that disclosures of changes in deferred tax valuation allowances (VA) provide information beyond contemporaneous earnings reports. Prior research shows that, in setting VA, managers consider the extent that taxable income is available from various sources for the realization of deferred tax assets (DTA). Our evidence supports a characterization where investors use VA disclosures to infer management's expectations about DTA, its realizability, and future taxable income available for realization. These findings are more generally relevant for assessing the consequences of reporting standards that require or permit management judgment, especially about future outcomes. In particular, they support the view that discretion can be a vehicle for management to communicate expectations to the benefit of investors.

We investigate two explanations for the declining contemporaneous linear relation between annual stock returns and accounting earnings over the past 30 years: (1) earnings increasingly reflect news with a lag relative to stock prices and (2) earnings increasingly reflect good and bad news in an asymmetric fashion. We hypothesize and find that annual earnings have a weaker association with current price changes and a stronger association with lagged price changes over time. We hypothesize and find that annual earnings reflect current positive price changes less strongly and current negative price changes more strongly over time. We also find that asymmetry with respect to lagged price changes is increasingly important over time. Strikingly, we find that, since the mid-1980s, the aggregation of earnings over a four-year window increasingly does less to reduce the importance of lags and asymmetry.

Prior research suggests that investors' response to analyst forecast revisions increases with the analyst's forecast accuracy. We extend this research by examining whether investors appear to extract all of the information that analyst characteristics provide about forecast accuracy. We find that only some of the analyst characteristics that are associated with future forecast accuracy are also associated with return responses to forecast revisions. This suggests that investors fail to extract some of the information that analyst characteristics can provide about future forecast accuracy. In addition, forecast properties other than expected accuracy appear to be value-relevant. For example, investors respond more strongly to forecasts released earlier in the year and to forecasts by analysts employed by large brokerages than appears warranted by the ability of forecast timeliness and broker size to predict forecast accuracy. We conclude that investors respond to analysts' forecast revisions as if forecast accuracy is not all that matters.

The concept of materiality provides a basis for auditors to ignore small misstatements, but the definition of “small” in this context is ambiguous. The issue of “materiality-standard-setting” has been raised recently by Arthur Levitt, former chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission. We examine how materiality uncertainty affects the auditor's evaluation of audit evidence and a manager's choice of earnings overstatement in a strategic auditing model where earnings misstatements also include unintentional system error. We find that when the expected cost of accepting financial statements that are materially misstated, which we refer to as an audit failure, is relatively large, an increase in materiality uncertainty results in a more conservative auditor evaluation of the audit evidence and a decrease in the amount of intentional overstatement. Alternatively, if the auditor's expected cost of extending audit procedures is relatively high, then an increase in materiality uncertainty results in a less conservative auditor evaluation of the audit evidence and an increase in the manager's earnings overstatement. The auditor also becomes increasingly conservative as the report increases when the information system is sufficiently noisy. Finally, when the expected cost of audit failure is large, the equilibrium audit risk can increase or decrease in materiality uncertainty despite the corresponding increase in auditor conservatism and decrease in intentional overstatement. Audit risk is the average probability of audit failure across all possible evidence outcomes.