Knowledge that Transforms

We study the economic consequences of managers’ vocal delivery quality during earnings conference calls. We introduce a novel measure, vocal delivery quality, that captures the acoustic comprehensibility of audio information for an average listener. Our measure relies on a deep-learning algorithm applied to a large sample of earnings call audio files. Consistent with predictions from the psychology and accounting literatures, we find evidence that the quality of managers’ vocal delivery deteriorates when they deliver negative news, such as a decrease in earnings or negative narrative information, and positive but transitory earnings news. We show that the stock market reacts in real time to managers’ vocal delivery quality. We also document that the vocal delivery quality has an effect on information intermediaries such as analysts and the media. Overall, our findings underscore the role of vocal dimensions in corporate oral disclosures.

We study the impact of transparency about banks’ costs on loan interest rates. The Indian Central Bank required banks to disclose a cost-based benchmark interest rate instead of the prime rate. The banks could price loans using any spread to the cost-based benchmark. We find that this change, which made banks’ cost structures more transparent, lowers the interest rates charged and leads to increases in debtor firms’ total borrowings and investments. We hypothesize that increased cost transparency reveals relationship rents to competitor banks and makes it difficult for incumbent banks to maintain high relationship rents because of increased threat of entry.

We use staggered enactments of state stakeholder constituency laws as a natural experiment to examine the effect of such laws on corporate pension risk shifting. Our analysis encompasses three components of pension risk shifting: funding risk, investment risk, and benefit risk. We observe a reduction in all three elements of pension risk shifting following the enactment of stakeholder orientation laws that promote greater consideration of stakeholder interests. We also find that the post-enactment reduction in pension risk-shifting is greater for firms with fewer investment opportunities. Overall, our results provide insight into how stakeholder constituency can mitigate an important form of risk-shifting.

This paper examines audit offices’ human capital investment in response to client restatement announcements and the resulting effects on audit quality and audit office client base. We find that audit offices attempt to acquire human capital and talent by posting more audit-related job positions just after a client announces a restatement. The increase in job postings follows restatements with more negative announcement returns and restatements of annual financial statements, and is concentrated among more senior and experienced positions. Importantly, the increased job postings are not driven by replacement hiring due to individual auditor departures and reflect more auditors joining the office. These human capital investments reduce future client misstatements and losses in client portfolios, indicating improvements in actual and perceived audit quality. Audit offices are also more likely to replace audit managing partners and prevent the signing partners of the misstated financial statements from signing new audit reports after restatement announcements.

This paper explores how the emergence of generative artificial intelligence is reshaping the information environment in capital markets. Leveraging an unexpected ban on ChatGPT in Italy, we examine its impact on the information processing capabilities of market participants. We employ metrics for AI-generated text detection to show that the ban coincides with decreased AI usage by domestic financial analysts and fewer earnings forecasts issued relative to foreign analysts covering the same firm. The negative effects are more pronounced among analysts whose pre-ban reports are more consistent with AI use or analysts with a technical background. The ban also diminishes forecast accuracy, increases reliance on industry-specific information, and reduces information efficiency. Furthermore, investor reactions to earnings announcements become more pronounced, and bid–ask spreads widen, reflecting lower market efficiency.

Using the IPO setting, we test whether firms signal the quality of their investments in innovation activities by claiming R&D tax credits. We find the presence and amount of the R&D credit are each associated with lower information asymmetry and with higher investor demand at IPO. Conservatively, we estimate that sample firms realize additional IPO proceeds of 32–45 percent of their creditable R&D expenditures, indicating economically significant non-tax benefits associated with the R&D credit. We verify the R&D credit signal by showing its positive association with firms’ future patenting activity, patent citations, and post-IPO stock returns. Results from these tests are concentrated among firms limited in their ability to obtain tax benefits from R&D credits, consistent with the R&D credit providing nontax benefits as a signal of innovation investment quality.

Roughly two decades ago, standard setters mandated recognition of two controversial expenses: stock-based compensation (SBC) and amortization of intangibles from acquisitions (AMT). Today, most firms “undo” GAAP by excluding these recurring expenses from earnings as part of their non-GAAP reporting. Do investors agree? Using short-window returns around quarterly earnings announcements, we find investors react similarly to unexpected SBC/AMT, regardless of firms' exclusion reporting. Further, among excluders, earnings that include SBC or AMT explain investor reaction better than earnings stripped of these items. Thus, these excluded expenses are an important exception to the well-known regularity that investors find non-GAAP earnings more useful than GAAP earnings. Additional tests reveal that exclusion is not informative about future persistence. Overall, our findings suggest that, in general, investors ignore firms’ exclusion of recurring expenses, which may offer reassurance to standard setters.

We examine the relation between board risk oversight and environmental and social (E&S) performance. Our study is motivated by heightened awareness of E&S risks and growing calls for their inclusion in the purview of board risk oversight. Using a novel proprietary dataset on board risk oversight for an international sample, we find that firms with more extensive board risk oversight are more likely to institute E&S compensation, set environmental (but not social) targets, adopt policies that address E&S risks and opportunities, and issue an E&S report. Our exploratory evidence also shows that more extensive board risk oversight is associated with better environmental outcomes, specifically lower monetized environmental costs, but worse social outcomes, namely lower monetized employee benefits and a higher likelihood of social risk incidents. Our results suggest that risk oversight is analogous to a constrained optimization problem whereby risk exposures are prioritized and receive different degrees of oversight consideration by the board.

Investors in financial markets are often uncertain about the relationship intensity between firms and have to rely on firms’ disclosure of such relationship intensity. We analytically study the asset pricing implications of this relationship intensity uncertainty and how such uncertainty affects firms’ incentives to form and disclose their relationship intensities (i.e., the real implications). We find that while such disclosure has a positive price impact by increasing the expected cash flow, it also has a negative impact by reducing the diversification benefit of investing in multiple firms that have more correlated cash flows. The price impact upon relationship intensity disclosure is therefore not monotone: it increases with the expected benefit of relationship and decreases with the risk of the underlying relationship. Our analysis implies that mandatory disclosure of firm relationship intensities may both destroy relationship development and reduce investor welfare, i.e., has adverse real consequences.

I examine whether and how foreign bank branch participation in U.S. loan syndicates influences loan contract design. I predict that foreign bank branches’ dollar funding liquidity risk and information frictions increase renegotiation costs and affect loan contract design. I find that loan contracts with greater foreign bank branch participation include fewer flexibility-reducing covenants, such as capital expenditure and balance sheet covenants, that restrict borrowers from making positive net present value investments. I document similar results using matched sample and plausibly exogenous variation in foreign bank branch participation. Additionally, loan contracts with greater foreign bank branch participation are more likely to feature split control rights, which give banks in revolving lines of credit the exclusive right to renegotiate. In contrast, foreign bank branches are more likely to be included in covenant-lite term loans. Overall, I show that foreign bank branch participation affects U.S. syndicated loan contract design through renegotiation costs.