ABSTRACT We investigate the role played by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) in monitoring fair value disclosures in regulatory filings. Specifically, we assess whether SEC action via the issuance of fair value comment letters to registrants is followed by reductions in uncertainty about the firms' fair value estimates. We hypothesize that registrants that receive a comment letter focusing on their fair value disclosure policies experience reductions in investor uncertainty regarding their fair value estimates in the post-letter period, compared to the pre-letter period. Supporting this prediction, we find that for the periods after the fair value comment letters, the associations between Level 2 and 3 fair value assets and our measures of uncertainty are significantly reduced. These findings are robust to a series of tests designed to ensure that we do not simply capture general changes in market uncertainty levels for firms investing in these types of assets. Our study contributes to the further understanding of market participants' perception of fair value disclosures by investigating the role of SEC enforcement. This finding is important given recent criticisms of fair value reporting emanating from the highest levels of government and industry. Data Availability: Data are available from public sources identified in the paper.

ABSTRACT We examine how accounting practices that aggregate or disaggregate the contributions of different economic agents influence the choice of organizational form. We consider a principal/multi-agent model where the principal either contracts with all parties directly or delegates part of the contracting authority to one of the agents. Delegated contracts improve risk sharing and generate implicit incentives for the agent entrusted with contracting authority. However, delegated contracts also entail a loss of control in motivating lower-level agents. In addition, when performance is aggregated, delegated contracts render agents' incentives more interdependent and create spillovers up and down the hierarchy. We demonstrate that accounting practices that aggregate the performance of multiple agents can complement organizational forms characterized by greater decentralization. In contrast, accounting practices that capture agents' performance contributions separately favor more centralized organizational forms. Our findings suggest that in settings where performance measurement systems are more aggregate, decentralization is more prevalent. JEL Classifications: L22; M12; M4.

ABSTRACT We document the interrelationship of disclosure policy decisions among firms by providing evidence that the cessation of quarterly management forecast guidance by 656 firms (“stoppers”) during 2004–2009 is associated with a pursuant increase in quarterly forecasts by previously non-forecasting firms in the same industries (“free-riders”). Increased forecasting by free-riders is positively associated with the information loss in the industry (proxied by the number of stoppers in the industry, the strength of previously existing information transfer relations between stoppers and free-riders, and whether stoppers and free-riders are peer firms) and the importance of the information loss to the free-riders (proxied by analyst following and the existence of new share issues). Following the cessation event, free-riders' cost of capital decreases as a function of the extent to which free-riders immediately initiate quarterly forecasting. JEL Classifications: M41. Data Availability: Data are available from the sources indicated in the text.

ABSTRACT Allowing CEOs to hedge the risk in the compensation contracts their firms give them has been controversial because such hedging allows the executives to undo some of the incentive effects of those contracts; it also results in a divergence between the compensation firms pay their senior executives and the compensation those executives effectively receive. We analyze these personal hedging activities of CEOs and identify when firms may gain or lose by allowing or prohibiting such hedging. We also describe variations in CEOs' demands for various compensation hedges, and how firms will restructure their CEOs' compensation contracts in anticipation that the CEOs will engage in such hedging.

ABSTRACT We examine how state liability regimes within the United States affect auditor reporting decisions. We exploit variation across state-level common law in two aspects of auditor liability: the extent to which auditors can be held liable by third parties for negligence, and rules for apportioning liability across multiple defendants. We find that auditors are more likely to issue a modified going-concern (GC) report to financially distressed clients from high-liability states than to those from low-liability states. We sharpen inferences using a natural experiment that examines the causal effects of two exogenous shocks to auditor third-party liability standards, which dramatically restricted auditors' liability in New Jersey in 1995 and in California in 1992. Results from difference-in-differences tests imply that auditors' propensity to issue a modified opinion for client firms in New Jersey and California decreases significantly after the decline in auditors' litigation exposure, relative to control firms from other jurisdictions. These findings add to our understanding of how litigation risk affects auditor behavior and highlight an important source of variation in litigation risk within the U.S. that has seldom been studied to date.

ABSTRACT In a dynamic setting with demand following a random process, we ask how investment and operating decisions can be delegated to a manager with unknown time preferences. Only the manager observes the demand realization in each period and, therefore, has private information when choosing whether to acquire the productive asset and, subsequently, how to utilize it. We derive accrual accounting-based performance measures under which the manager will make the efficient decisions provided the investment date is exogenously given. We show that in an environment where demand follows a martingale process, the corresponding accounting rules are more decelerated if the firm has the option to idle capacity in case of negative demand shocks. We then describe the limitations of accounting-based performance measures in a scenario where the investment date is endogenously determined, i.e., the firm has an option to wait.

ABSTRACT Our study examines how the uniform rules of FIN 48, which governs accounting for income tax uncertainty, affect the relevance of income tax accounting. By requiring all firms to follow the same recognition and measurement process, the FASB intended FIN 48 to improve the relevance of income tax accounting. However, practitioners argue that reserves reported under FIN 48 lack relevance because they represent liabilities that will never be paid to tax authorities. Consistent with these concerns, we estimate that over a three-year period, only 24 cents of every dollar of reserves unwind via settlements. Moreover, contrary to the FASB's intention, we find no evidence that FIN 48 increased the ability of tax expense to predict future tax cash flows. Rather, we find that the predictive ability of tax expense for future tax cash flows decreases among firms for which FIN 48 is most restrictive. Finally, we find no evidence that investors identify firms for which reserves overstate future tax cash outflows and incorporate this into their valuations. Our results provide evidence that the uniform accounting rules of FIN 48 negatively affect the relevance of income tax accounting. JEL Classifications: H25; M41; M48.

ABSTRACT This paper reports five studies examining audit team members' willingness to raise audit issues. The first study is a survey of interacting audit teams that provides evidence that team members are more willing to speak up when they view their leader as team-oriented (i.e., emphasizing team success as opposed to the leader's own personal advancement). Experiments 1–3 provide converging evidence that audit seniors are more willing to speak up to a team-oriented leader and about issues that are aligned with that leader's concerns. Experiment 4 provides evidence that the effect of team-oriented leadership on willingness to speak up is mediated by team members' commitment to the team leader and, to a lesser extent, by their identification with their team, but not by concerns about the immediate or eventual repercussions of speaking up. Together, these studies provide evidence that auditors' willingness to raise audit issues is affected by what the auditor has to say and how they think their message will be received, potentially affecting audit effectiveness and audit efficiency. Data Availability: Contact the authors.

ABSTRACT In this study, we examine the benefits of membership in an accounting firm association, network, or alliance (collectively referred to as “an association”). Associations provide member accounting firms with numerous benefits, including access to the expertise of professionals from other independent member firms, joint conferences and technical trainings, assistance in dealing with staffing and geographic limitations, and the ability to use the association name in marketing materials. We expect these benefits to result in higher-quality audits and higher audit fees (or audit fee premiums). Using hand-collected data on association membership, we find that association member firms conduct higher-quality audits than nonmember firms, where audit quality is proxied for by fewer Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (PCAOB) inspection deficiencies and fewer financial statement misstatements, as well as less extreme absolute discretionary accruals and lower positive discretionary accruals. We also find that audit fees are higher for clients of member firms than for clients of nonmember firms, suggesting that clients are willing to pay an audit fee premium to engage association member audit firms. Finally, we find that member firm audits are of similar quality to a size-matched sample of Big 4 audits, but member firm clients pay lower fee premiums than do Big 4 clients. Our inferences are robust to the use of company size-matched control samples, audit firm size-matched control samples, propensity score matching, two-stage least squares regression, and to analyses that consider changes in association membership. Our findings should be of interest to regulators because they suggest that association membership assists small audit firms in overcoming barriers to auditing larger audit clients. In addition, our findings should be informative to audit committees when making auditor selection decisions, and to investors and accounting researchers interested in the relation between audit firm type and audit quality.

ABSTRACT This study examines the effects that two balanced scorecard framework (BSF) elements, causal linkages between strategic objectives (“causal linkages”) and time delay information (“delays”) in a strategy map, have on long-term profit performance in a dynamic decision-making environment. Using a computer-based simulation task, we conduct a 3 × (4) experiment (control group; causal linkages without delays; causal linkages with delays; four simulation rounds) and find that managers presented with causal linkages without delays generate greater long-term profit compared to a control group. For managers presented with causal linkages with delays, long-term profit generation is higher than the control group, but is not significantly different from the causal linkages without delays treatment. Those managers presented with causal linkages with delays, however, demonstrate learning across the four simulation rounds. In contrast, learning is found to plateau for the causal linkages without delays treatment and is not present for the control group. We also examine the cognitive mechanism through which these two BSF elements impact performance, by measuring the accuracy of two components of managers' mental models. Data Availability: Experimental materials are available upon request from the authors.