This paper examines how auditors' judgments about accounting policies may differ when experiencing different levels of affinity for client management and facing different levels of pressure from client management. The theory of motivated reasoning is employed to analyze the effects of these two factors that should lead individual auditors to adopt as a directional goal the acceptance of client management's aggressive accounting. Accordingly, we predict and find that auditors experiencing greater client affinity and facing explicit client pressure suggest lower adjustments to clients' aggressive accounting, consistent with motivated reasoning's goal-related predictions. But our study goes further and investigates also how auditors react when motivated reasoning theory's “reasonableness constraint” is potentially violated by auditors who perceive excessive client pressure. We predict and find, consistent with the individual auditor's “reasonable constraint” being triggered in at least some auditors, that perception of client pressure intensity leads those auditors to propose larger adjustments to client accounting. To support our findings, we re-analyze the data from a prior motivated reasoning audit experiment, replicate that study's reported directional goal results employing methods used in this study and, in addition, find similar results to those found in this study for increased client pressure intensity on auditor judgment.

Overconfident CEOs are more willing to initiate investment projects that require experimentation, yet tend to defer responding to the bad news when the project is not performing as planned. Accounting conservatism accelerates the recognition of the bad news and its dissemination to gatekeepers, making it more likely that the CEO will acknowledge the problem earlier and start searching for solutions. Therefore, firms where both characteristics—CEO overconfidence and accounting conservatism—are present should perform better. Our empirical tests confirm this prediction: firms that practice conservative accounting and are run by overconfident CEOs exhibit better cash flow performance. Our results continue to hold in a variety of settings, including market reactions to acquisitions, cash flow downside risk, and analyst following. Further, the joint positive effect of CEO overconfidence and accounting conservatism on firm performance is stronger in high-uncertainty environments and in firms facing less stringent financing constraints, consistent with theoretical predictions.

This study examines the effect of the Jumpstart Our Business Startups Act (JOBS Act) on information uncertainty in IPO firms. The JOBS Act creates a new category of issuer, the Emerging Growth Company (EGC), and exempts EGCs from several disclosures required for non-EGCs. Our findings are consistent with proprietary cost concerns motivating EGCs to eliminate some of the previously mandatory disclosures, which increases information uncertainty in the IPO market, attracts investors who rely more on private information, and leads EGCs to provide additional post-IPO disclosures to mitigate the increased information uncertainty. Our results also are consistent with agency explanations, whereby EGCs exploit the JOBS Act provisions to avoid compensation-related disclosures, which results in larger IPO underpricing for such firms. Overall, we provide evidence on how reduced mandatory disclosure affects the IPO market.

Propensity score matching (PSM) has become a popular technique for estimating average treatment effects (ATEs) in accounting research. In this study, we discuss the usefulness and limitations of PSM relative to more traditional multiple regression (MR) analysis. We discuss several PSM design choices and review the use of PSM in 86 articles in leading accounting journals from 2008–2014. We document a significant increase in the use of PSM from zero studies in 2008 to 26 studies in 2014. However, studies often oversell the capabilities of PSM, fail to disclose important design choices, and/or implement PSM in a theoretically inconsistent manner. We then empirically illustrate complications associated with PSM in three accounting research settings. We first demonstrate that when the treatment is not binary, PSM tends to confine analyses to a subsample of observations where the effect size is likely to be smallest. We also show that seemingly innocuous design choices greatly influence sample composition and estimates of the ATE. We conclude with suggestions for future research considering the use of matching methods. Data Availability: All data used are available from sources cited in the text.