The triangle model of responsibility (Schlenker, Britt, Pennington, Murphy, and Doherty 1994) predicts that the extent that investors hold management responsible for an adverse event is jointly determined by the links among three elements—management, the adverse event, and the relevant accounting regulations/standards or public norms. Applying this theory, we conduct experiments to examine how the locus of breach (external versus internal) moderates the efficacy of management's responsibility acceptance (higher versus lower). Our results show that management's higher (versus lower) responsibility acceptance is a more effective strategy in the presence of an external breach, but not in the presence of an internal breach (Experiment 1). Follow-up experiments suggest that this result is driven by the relative strength of the triangle links underlying the external versus internal breaches, rather than the locus per se. JEL Classifications: G40; M41. Data Availability: Contact the authors.

Standard setters contend that fair value accounting yields the most relevant measurement for financial instruments. We examine this claim by comparing the value relevance of banks' financial statements under fair value accounting with that under current GAAP, which is largely based on historical costs. We find that the combined value relevance of book value of equity and income under fair value is less than that under GAAP. We also find that fair value income is less value-relevant than GAAP income because of the inclusion of transitory unrealized gains and losses in fair value income. More surprisingly, we find that book value of equity under fair value is not more value-relevant than under GAAP, due both to divergence between exit value and value-in-use and to measurement error in fair value estimates. Overall, our results suggest that financial statements under fair value accounting provide less relevant information for bank valuation than financial statements under current GAAP.

In the presence of litigation-facing suppliers, the supply chain relationship is at risk. Suppliers with principal customers (dependent suppliers) have a higher concentration of sales to customers, and they are more at risk relative to suppliers without principal customers (non-dependent suppliers). As a result, we predict and find that litigation disclosure patterns differ for the two supplier types: dependent suppliers are more likely to delay bad news and accelerate good news related to litigation outcomes, compared to non-dependent suppliers. Such strategic disclosure patterns in our end-game setting are opposite to those documented in the existing supply chain literature for the repeated-game setting (for example, Hui, Klasa, and Yeung 2012).