This paper examines the market pricing of Jones (1991) modelestimated abnormal accruals (often termed “discretionary accruals” in the prior literature) to test whether stock prices rationally reflect the one-year-ahead earnings implications of these accruals. Using the Mishkin (1983) and hedge-portfolio test methods Sloan (1996) employs, I find that the market overestimates the persistence, or one-year-ahead earnings implications, of abnormal accruals, and consequently overprices these accruals. These results extend Subramanyam (1996) by demonstrating that the market not only prices, but also overprices abnormal accruals. They also suggest that the overpricing of total accruals that Sloan (1996) documents is due largely to abnormal accruals. The results are robust to five alternative measures of abnormal accruals, and still hold when I estimate abnormal accruals after controlling for major unusual but largely nondiscretionary accruals. The latter finding is consistent with the notion that the market overprices the portion of abnormal accruals stemming from managerial discretion.

[An auditor's reputation lends credibility to the earnings report that he audits. An unresolved issue is whether auditor size is correlated with auditor quality, where a high-quality auditor is defined as one who brings about more credible earnings reports. According to basic intuition and a modified Holthausen-Verrecchia (1988) model, investors' response to an earnings surprise will depend on the perceived credibility of the earnings report. In this study, we examine whether the earnings response coefficient (ERC) differs between Big Eight (B8) and non-Big Eight (NB8) audited firms. This provides a test of the joint hypotheses that auditor size is a proxy for auditor credibility and of the modified H-V model. Consistent with the joint hypotheses, we find that the ERCs of Big Eight clients are statistically significantly higher than for non-Big Eight clients. The result obtains in both a matched sample of firms paired according to industry membership, and a switch sample of firms grouped according to shifts from and to B8 and NB8 auditors. Furthermore, the result is robust with respect to the inclusion of other explanatory factors for ERC that have been suggested by previous studies: growth and persistence, risk, firm size, and predisclosure information environment.]

Deficiencies identified in complex audit tasks suggest room for improvement in audit judgments. I propose that aligning an auditor's focus (prevention/promotion) and mindset (concrete/abstract) in a compatible way can induce an experience of “regulatory fit” that improves judgments compared to “regulatory non-fit.” Results are more complex than previously thought. I find that fit versus non-fit improves judgments, but only for auditors who are initially less engaged in the judgment task. For auditors who are initially more engaged, non-fit versus fit improves judgments. A second experiment provides converging evidence. Prior research finds strong evidence that fit improves performance versus non-fit. The possibility that non-fit could improve performance has received little attention. By conceptualizing initial task engagement and identifying it as a key moderator, my study suggests that non-fit also has value, and that assessing auditor preexisting conditions before prescribing interventions is important for improving judgments.

I examine whether voting premiums are reduced following mandatory International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) adoption for firms that have a dual-class share structure. I find that mandatory adopters' voting premiums decrease, on average, by 8 percent subsequent to mandatory IFRS adoption. This effect is statistically significant relative to the corresponding effect for non-IFRS adopters. Further, I find that this effect is more pronounced in countries with strong legal enforcement and for mandatory adopters that experience an increase in the transparency and comparability of reported information under the new accounting regime. Taken together, these results support the view that mandatory IFRS adoption benefits minority shareholders by providing an effective mechanism to constrain the private benefits of control. However, one should interpret these results with caution as concurrent efforts to strengthen corporate governance regimes and the enforcement of corporate and securities laws may also contribute to the decrease in voting premiums documented in this paper. Data Availability: Data used in this study are available from the sources listed in the text.

This paper examines the ex ante effects of public information quality on market prices and how such effects vary with information asymmetry among traders in a two-period experimental market. We vary public information quality by changing its precision and information asymmetry among traders by varying the distribution of private signals. We find high-quality public disclosure leads to increased price efficiency and decreased cost of capital in the pre-announcement period when information asymmetry is high. The impending high-quality public information increases the competition among informed traders, which leads prices to impound more private information and alleviates the adverse selection problems facing uninformed traders. Our study suggests building a high-quality public information environment (e.g., by adopting high-quality accounting standards or committing to transparent disclosure policies) would likely provide ex ante benefits for firms with significant adverse selection among traders.

An auditor's reputation lends credibility to the earnings report that he audits. An unresolved issue is whether auditor size is correlated with auditor quality, where a high-quality auditor is defined as one who brings about more credible earnings reports. According to basic intuition and a modified Holthausen-Verrecchia (1988) model, investors' response to an earnings surprise will depend on the perceived credibility of the earnings report. In this study, we examine whether the earnings response coefficient (ERC) differs between Big Eight (B8) and non-Big Eight (NB8) audited firms. This provides a test of the joint hypotheses that auditor size is a proxy for auditor credibility and of the modified H-V model. Consistent with the joint hypotheses, we find that the ERCs of Big Eight clients are statistically significantly higher than for non-Big Eight clients. The result obtains in both a matched sample of firms paired according to industry membership, and a switch sample of firms grouped according to shifts from and to B8 and NB8 auditors. Furthermore, the result is robust with respect to the inclusion of other explanatory factors for ERG that have been suggested by previous studies: growth and persistence, risk, firm size, and predisclosure information environment.

Earlier attempts to extend cost-volume-profit analyses to stochastic sales behavior are reinterpreted in terms of chance-constrained programming formulations to control for risks of failing to break even. The standard types of breakeven analyses usually employed as deterministic systems in accounting are shown also to apply in a surprisingly general manner to situations where risk or uncertainty in sales demands are present. Ways of extending such analyses to allow for new upper as well as lower limits on volume are developed and interpreted in detail. Suggestions and references are also supplied to indicate how such analyses can be extended further to provide contact with probabilistic programming (linear programming under uncertainty as well as stochastic linear programming and chance-constrained programming) approaches to planning and evaluation of portfolios of projects under combinations of liquidity and payback period constraints.

Whether the method of accounting for mergers affects the stock prices of the acquiring firm is investigated in this article. Many observers believe that companies using the pooling-of-interests method in an acquisition with positive goodwill enjoy higher stock prices because of the higher earnings they report when using this method. An efficient capital market, however, should be able to see through the particular accounting convention used to describe an event, such as a merger, and respond to the economics of the merger, not its accounting description The study analyzes a sample of pooling-of-interests mergers in the 1954-1964 period, and finds no abnormal price movements in the period surrounding the merger or the earnings announcements immediately after the merger. Conversely, some evidence of higher stock prices in the period preceding a merger for a much smaller sample of companies using the purchase method is found. The authors conclude that the pooling-of-interests method does not lead to abnormal stock price behavior for acquiring firms.

Does accounting regime play a role in the well-documented phenomenon of overbidding in M&As? The 2001 regulatory change from a goodwill amortization to a non-amortization regime (SFAS 142) affords us a quasi-experimental setting for testing the consequences of M&A accounting rules for acquirers' bidding decisions. Relying on a novel approach to modeling optimal bidding, our primary finding indicates a significant increase in overbidding in the post-2001 period, suggesting that M&A accounting has real consequences for bidding decisions, and that this result is robust to a battery of sensitivity tests. In addition, supplementary tests show that overbidding is more pronounced in pooling versus purchase transactions, and that the accounting regime's implications for overbidding and acquisition premium are distinct. Overall, our findings shed light on the role accounting plays in shaping managerial decisions—and, ultimately, shareholder wealth—in an important corporate setting. They may thus inform researchers, corporate boards, and standards setters. Data Availability: Data are available from the public sources cited in the text.