Knowledge that Transforms

I examine whether and to what extent firms credibly disclose proprietary private information ahead of seasoned equity offerings. I assess proprietary information disclosures based on the magnitude of the association between a private information-based proxy and stock returns. Using a difference-in-differences design around the Securities Offering Reform (SOR) of 2005, which relaxed restrictions on disclosures, I find that equity-issuing firms disclose more than twice as much proprietary information post-SOR relative to pre-SOR and relative to the same change for the control firms. I corroborate my findings using major customer identity disclosure and limiting the sample to firms with multiple equity offerings. Results are robust after controlling for information flow from insider trading, institutional investors, and financial analysts. Finally, I document that disclosure of proprietary information leads to a 10–23 percent drop in underpricing. These findings offer new insights into how firms balance the proprietary costs and benefits of disclosure.

This paper presents a costly voluntary disclosure model in which the information quality of a signal about a firm’s future cash flow is unknown, where the information quality, also called signal quality, refers to signal precision. Disclosure plays a dual role in firm valuation, providing information about both the cash flow and signal quality. We identify a necessary and sufficient condition under which the firm price under disclosure is a nonmonotonic and bounded function of the signal. Under this condition, as the disclosure cost increases, the equilibrium changes from an intermediate pool of undisclosed signals to a low-end pool of undisclosed signals, to two disjoint pools of undisclosed signals, and finally to no disclosure. Our results remain qualitatively unchanged when the firm may or may not have private information. Overall, this study offers alternative explanations for the empirical findings of why some firms disclose (withhold) seemingly bad (good) news.

We describe variation in the reporting quality (i.e., accuracy and bias of reported net asset values (NAVs)) of private equity (PE) funds across types of external monitors (investors and auditors) and third-party service providers (valuation specialists, marketers, and administrators). In contrast to public markets, we find only limited evidence that reporting quality varies with the composition and types of investors in PE funds. We observe, however, that reporting quality varies with auditor involvement and the use of third-party service providers; these associations often differ across buyout (BO) and venture capital (VC) funds and from those observed in public markets. Our evidence is important to investors and regulators, especially now that PE supersedes public markets as the main vehicle to raise capital and as regulators increase their focus on private markets. Data Availability: Data used in this study are available from public sources listed in the paper.

We examine whether corporate financing activities (CFA) in aggregate convey information about the macroeconomy. Using statement of cash flow information to construct a bottom-up measure of CFA, we find that it has significant predictive power for future economic activity when we exclude a small set of firms whose external financing is largely insulated from macroeconomic conditions. This CFA index has predictive power beyond that of the Gilchrist-Zakrajsek credit spread, aggregate earnings, and other macroeconomic indicators in predicting future GDP in both in-sample and out-of-sample forecasting tests. Impulse responses from a structural vector autoregression show that unexpected decreases in this CFA index lead to a large and persistent contraction in economic activity for up to four quarters. Our results suggest that a simple portfolio-based CFA measure helps capture supply-of-capital effects from the financial accelerator mechanism and hence has significant incremental predictive power for real economic activity. Data Availability: Data are available from the public sources cited in the text.

Using GPS location data from customers’ mobile devices, we develop measures of customer shopping behavior intended to capture the likelihood that customers will shop again in the future, and we examine their associations with firms’ financial decisions and outcomes. We measure customers’ propensity to return using the frequency, distance, duration, and timing of their past visits to a firm’s retail locations. We find a positive association between customers’ propensity to return and the persistence of the firm’s revenues and earnings. We also find a positive association between customers’ propensity to return and the efficiency of investing and operating decisions among firms likely to incorporate customer data into their internal information systems. Our results illustrate conditions under which revenues and earnings are sustainable and when managerial decisions are consistent with insights provided by customer information. Data Availability: Data are available from the public sources cited in the text.

Ball and Brown (1968) introduce a method to measure accounting earnings’ contribution to price discovery toward the end-of-period price. Building on this method, we examine a comprehensive set of corporate disclosures and document a large gap in their contribution to annual price discovery between bad and good news years (40 percent versus over 60 percent), despite no such difference in stock return variance (partial R2). These patterns are consistent with managers proactively releasing good news to counteract negative news during bad news years. Our finding broadens the concept of news bundling from concurrent releases to intertemporal dynamics within an annual window. Voluntary press releases are a key driver of this disparity in price discovery, adding 3 percent in bad times while being the top contributor in good times (27 percent). Investor private information acquisition contributes to bridging the gap left by corporate disclosures in price discovery during bad news years. Data Availability: Data are available from public sources cited in the text.

We examine how resilient firms’ financial reporting processes are to the sudden death of a Chief Financial Officer (CFO)—a plausibly exogenous shock that allows us to provide insights on the role of the CFO while abstracting away from the endogenous nature of CFO employment. We find that the likelihood of an adverse reporting event—a delayed SEC filing or ex post restatement—doubles in the year following the event, on average. The financial process is less resilient in more complex firms and more resilient in firms with stronger internal controls and highly educated employees. Sudden CEO deaths, in contrast, have no discernible impact on adverse financial reporting events. Collectively, our study highlights the value of the CFO on the financial reporting process as well as potential financial reporting benefits of CFO contingency plans. Data Availability: Data are available from the sources cited in the text.

Although the PCAOB and the Center for Audit Quality have raised concerns about the negative consequences of audit-employee turnover (PCAOB 2015, 2024; CAQ 2019), these consequences remain largely undocumented due to data limitations. We use novel data to measure how audit-employee turnover within individual offices of accounting firms explains the auditor’s ability to deliver for their clients and shapes the auditor-client relationship. We document that audit-employee turnover hampers the auditor’s ability to deliver the audit and leads to auditor realignment. Specifically, audit-employee turnover is associated with costlier, less timely, and less thorough audits that are of lower quality, which damage auditor-client relationships and lead to greater auditor switching and clients selecting auditors with lower turnover. We find that the presence of other strains to the auditor-client relationship exacerbates turnover’s link with auditor realignment. We further find that the impact of turnover varies by employee rank and when turnover occurs. Data Availability: Data are available from sources identified in the text.

We examine how coproduction develops between auditors and clients and its potential impact on the professional skepticism (PS) of auditors. We mobilize Knechel, Thomas, and Driskill’s (2020) theoretical framework and Social Exchange Theory to analyze interviews with 24 audit partners and 26 chief financial officers and controllers. We find that auditors and clients share a view that they cocreate audits as they each contribute and combine competencies. Coproduction redresses information asymmetries, which enables PS. Although auditor-client relationships (ACRs) facilitate coproduction through reciprocity and trust, coproduction fosters conditions where auditors must balance exercising skeptical judgments and actions and abdicating professional responsibilities that result in impaired PS. The findings are useful for audit practitioners, standard-setters, and regulators as they will help strengthen policies, standards, and regulations on managing ACRs to enhance PS. The study offers theoretical and methodological directions for future research. Data Availability: Data are protected by confidentiality agreements with the interviewees.

Evidence reveals that managers exercise discretion over budget estimates, but little is known about whether revenues or expenses are more susceptible to budget discretion. Drawing upon regulatory focus theory, we predict a pattern of budget discretion that has not previously been identified. To test our theory, we conduct a series of experiments where managers face a goal to either minimize the performance metric to avoid missing the target (minimal budget goal) or maximize the performance metric to achieve a desired outcome (maximal budget goal). When managers face a minimal budget goal, they are more likely to make self-interested budget estimates for uncertain expenses than monetarily equivalent uncertain revenues. Conversely, when managers face a maximal budget goal, they are more likely to make self-interested budget estimates for uncertain revenues than monetarily equivalent uncertain expenses. Thus, managers prefer acts of inclusion over acts of exclusion when pursuing their budget goals.