Knowledge that Transforms

This study investigates how differences between the rating agencies' initial (at the date of debt issuance) and subsequent (post-issuance) monitoring incentives affect securitizing banks' rating accuracy. We hypothesize that the agencies have stronger incentives to monitor issuers when providing initial versus post-issuance ratings. We document that initial ratings are positively associated with off-balance sheet securitized assets and incrementally associated with on-balance sheet retained securities. However, subsequent ratings fail to capture current exposure to off-balance sheet securitizations. We also find that subsequent ratings reflect default risk less accurately than initial ratings. The subsequent ratings' responsiveness to default risk is worse when a bank has more off-balance sheet securitized assets. Collectively, our findings are consistent with lax post-issuance monitoring. They raise questions about the effectiveness of using ratings as an ongoing contracting mechanism and suggest that conclusions about rating accuracy could differ depending on whether researchers focus on initial versus post-issuance ratings.

We develop estimates of a firm's foreign earnings designated as permanently reinvested (PRE) and the unrecorded deferred tax liability (TAX) associated with PRE that are independent of whether a firm explicitly discloses this information. We then investigate firms' noncompliance with Accounting Standards Codification (ASC) 740 provisions that require financial statement disclosure of PRE and either the tax associated with PRE or a statement that calculating the tax is not practicable. We find that a nontrivial portion of firms do not comply with the PRE disclosure requirements and that the amounts of undisclosed PRE and the related tax are substantial in magnitude. Cross-sectional evidence suggests managers opportunistically choose when to disclose PRE and TAX and that compliance with PRE disclosure requirements increased following the American Jobs Creation Act of 2004, which increased incentives to disclose PRE. JEL Classifications: M40; M41; H25; K34. Data Availability: Data used in this study are available from public sources identified in the paper.

We study the frequency of restatements by foreign firms listed on U.S. exchanges. We find that the restatement rate of U.S.-listed foreign firms is significantly lower than that of comparable U.S. firms and that the difference depends on the firm's home country characteristics. Foreign firms from countries with a weak rule of law are less likely to restate than are firms from strong rule of law countries. While the lower rate of restatements can represent an absence of errors, it can also indicate a lack of detection and disclosure of errors and irregularities. We infer the effect of detection and disclosure by associating the frequency of restatements with the quality of the firm's internal control system. We find that only U.S. firms and foreign firms from strong rule of law countries show a positive association between restatement frequency and internal control weaknesses. Firms from weak rule of law countries show no significant association. We interpret these findings as home country enforcement affecting firms' likelihood of detecting and reporting existing accounting misstatements. This suggests that for U.S.-listed foreign firms, less frequent restatements can be a signal of opportunistic reporting rather than a lack of accounting errors and irregularities.

We investigate whether multiemployer defined-benefit pension plan (MEPP) underfunding is priced by shareholders and creditors. Prior to the FASB's new MEPP standard (effective December 2011), when the disclosures on such plans were sparse, we find evidence (some evidence) that our estimate of a firm's share of MEPP underfunding is credit (value) relevant. We also find some evidence that a proxy for the funded status of a firm's MEPPs is incrementally value relevant over and above the firm's cash contributions, but no evidence that it is credit relevant. Furthermore, an estimate of MEPP underfunding that incorporates the additional disclosures required under the new MEPP standard is value and credit relevant, both individually and incrementally, over and above our old estimate. Overall, our findings suggest that shareholders and creditors view MEPP underfunding as a debt-like obligation and that the additional MEPP disclosures under the new standard are useful to market participants.

We test whether mandatory IFRS adoption affects firm-level “crash risk,” defined as the frequency of extreme negative stock returns. We separately analyze nonfinancial firms and financial firms because IFRS is likely to affect their crash risk differently. We find that IFRS adoption decreases crash risk among nonfinancial firms, especially among firms in poor information environments and in countries where IFRS adoption results in larger and more credible changes to local GAAP. In contrast, IFRS adoption has no effect on crash risk for financial firms, on average, but decreases crash risk among firms less affected by IFRS's fair value provisions, and increases crash risk among banks in countries with weak banking regulations. Overall, our results are consistent with the increased transparency from IFRS adoption broadly reducing crash risk among nonfinancial firms, but more selectively among financial firms, and with financial regulations playing a complementary role in implementing IFRS among financial firms.

We examine various penalties that could serve as enforcement mechanisms for Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) Section 404. We focus on firms with restatements, some of which had previously reported their control weaknesses as required and some of which acknowledged them only after announcing their restatement. We find no evidence that penalties are more likely for firms, managers, or auditors that fail to report existing control weaknesses. Instead, class action lawsuits, management turnover, and auditor turnover are all more likely in the wake of a restatement when control weaknesses had previously been reported. We find similar, although weaker, evidence for Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) sanctions. These results are consistent with disclosure of control weaknesses making it difficult for management to plausibly claim later that they were unaware of the underlying conditions that led to restatements. The results also suggest that the public and private enforcement mechanisms surrounding SOX 404 are unlikely to provide strong incentives for compliance and offer a potential explanation for why most restatements are issued by firms that previously claimed to have effective internal controls.

This paper examines how the reversibility of the accounting effect of asset impairments affects managers' investment decisions. We conduct two experiments in which participants act as CEO of a multi-division electronics company that suffers a large asset impairment at one of the divisions. Drawing on prior psychology research involving cognitive dissonance and decision reversibility, we predict and find that managers who are responsible for the decision to record the asset impairment invest more in the impaired division when the accounting effect of the impairment is reversible than when it is irreversible. This is consistent with the idea that reversible accounting effects encourage behavioral attempts to alter the cash flow outcome, while irreversible accounting effects encourage belief revision to rationalize the cash flow outcome. Also in line with cognitive dissonance theory, we show that managers who are not responsible for the decision to impair the asset, or managers who are given the opportunity to deny responsibility for the asset impairment, do not differ in their investment in the impaired division, regardless of impairment reversibility.

We characterize the necessary and sufficient conditions for communication of private, unverifiable managerial information to be valuable for stewardship purposes. First, the hard, verifiable information must be able to confirm to some extent the truthfulness of the manager's soft, unverifiable report. Second, neither the hard, verifiable information nor the soft, unverifiable managerial report should be too informative for providing effort incentives because that makes it harder to motivate truthful reports from the manager. In particular, this conflict can be sufficiently severe that eliciting reports from the manager has no value.

I examine the effect of marketable security holdings on monetary policy when those securities are classified under SFAS 115. Prior research has shown that loan growth is negatively related to monetary contractions, and that marketable security holdings mitigate that negative relationship. Those studies consider the securities in aggregate; I am the first to consider the securities classification in conjunction with monetary policy. I ask whether held-to-maturity securities, relative to non-held-to-maturity securities, are negatively related to loan growth. I find that the held-to-maturity securities are more negatively related to loan growth, relative to non-held-to-maturity securities. I also find that held-to-maturity securities are incrementally more negatively related to loan growth during monetary tightening, relative to non-tightening times. Finally, I find that both of these effects are stronger for small banks, relative to large banks. Given the findings, I conclude that held-to-maturity securities actually enhance, not mitigate, the effect of monetary tightening on bank lending.

Standard-setters believe high-quality internal audit functions (IAFs) serve as a key resource to audit committees for monitoring senior management. However, regulators do not enforce IAF quality or require disclosures relating to IAF quality, which is in stark contrast to regulatory requirements placed on boards, audit committees, and external auditors. Using proprietary data, I find that a composite measure of IAF quality is negatively associated with the likelihood of management misconduct even after controlling for board, audit committee, and external auditor quality. This result is robust to a variety of other specifications, including controlling for internal control quality and separate estimation during the pre- and post-SOX time periods. A difference-in-differences analysis indicates that misconduct firms have low IAF quality and competence during misconduct years and improve IAF quality and competence in the post-misconduct years. These findings suggest that regulators, audit committees, and other stakeholders should consider ways to improve IAF quality.