The objective of this study is to examine the market valuation of environmental capital expenditure investment related to pollution abatement in the pulp and paper industry. The total environmental capital expenditure of $8.7 billion by our sample firms during 1989–2000 supports the focus on this industry. In order to be capitalized, an asset should be associated with future economic benefits. The existing environmental literature suggests that investors condition their evaluation of the future economic benefits arising from environmental capital expenditure on an assessment of the firms' environmental performance. This literature predicts the emergence of two environmental stereotypes: low-polluting firms that overcomply with existing environmental regulations, and high-polluting firms that just meet minimal environmental requirements. Our valuation evidence indicates that there are incremental economic benefits associated with environmental capital expenditure investment by low-polluting firms but not high-polluting firms. We also find that investors use environmental performance information to assess unbooked environmental liabilities, which we interpret to represent the future abatement spending obligations of high-polluting firms in the pulp and paper industry. We estimate average unbooked liabilities of $560 million for high-polluting firms, or 16.6 percent of market capitalization.

This paper investigates auditors' assessments of earnings manipulation risk and corporate governance risk, and their planning and pricing decisions in the presence of these identified risks. To conduct this investigation, we use engagement partners' assessments of their existing clients made during the participating public accounting firm's client continuance risk assessment process. We find that auditors plan increased effort and billing rates for clients with earnings manipulation risk, and that the positive relationships between earnings manipulation risk and both effort and billing rates are greater for clients that also have heightened corporate governance risk. These findings provide evidence that auditors assess situations involving both an aggressive management and inadequate corporate governance, and that there is a relationship between those assessments and auditors' planning and pricing decisions.

We examine the relation between the cost of equity capital and seven attributes of earnings: accrual quality, persistence, predictability, smoothness, value relevance, timeliness, and conservatism. We characterize the first four attributes as accounting-based because they are typically measured using accounting information only. We characterize the last three attributes as market-based because proxies for these constructs are typically based on relations between market data and accounting data. Based on theoretical models predicting a positive association between information quality and cost of equity, we test for and find that firms with the least favorable values of each attribute, considered individually, generally experience larger costs of equity than firms with the most favorable values. The largest cost of equity effects are observed for the accounting-based attributes, in particular, accrual quality. These findings are robust to controls for innate determinants of the earnings attributes (firm size, cash flow and sales volatility, incidence of loss, operating cycle, intangibles use/intensity, and capital intensity), as well as to alternative proxies for the cost of equity capital.

We examine how fair-value-income measurement affects commercial bank equity analysts' risk and value judgments. Normatively, holding information and other underlying economics constant, bank analysts' risk and valuation assessments should distinguish between banks with different risks, but should not depend on how banks measure income. In our experiment, we vary income measurement—full-fair-value (all fair-value changes recognized in income) versus piecemeal-fair-value (some fair-value changes recognized in income, others disclosed in the notes). We also vary interest-rate-risk exposure (exposed versus hedged). We find that bank analysts' risk and value judgments distinguish banks' exposure to interest-rate risk only under full-fair-value-income measurement. Our evidence contributes to research concerned with financial performance reporting, risk, and fair-value accounting by demonstrating that differences in income measurement affect fundamental judgments of specialist analysts. Our findings are striking because they: (1) point toward an important role for measurement and recognition of fair-value gains and losses in income, and (2) suggest that note disclosure is not a substitute for financial-statement recognition (even for professional analysts specializing in banks and working in a context that involves assessment of core operations of a bank). These results should be of interest to accounting standard setters as they evaluate whether to require full-fair-value-income measurement.