Knowledge that Transforms

In this paper, we investigate how auditors respond to shareholder activism against their clients. Our study is important because activism may be viewed by auditors as a source of increased engagement risk, thereby impacting audit outcomes. The potential relationship between shareholder activism and audit outcomes leads us to predict that activism targets will pay higher audit fees and also will be more likely to receive adverse internal control opinions (ICOs) and first‐time going concern opinions (GCOs). Our results, which support all three predictions, suggest that the public scrutiny associated with activism campaigns heightens auditors' concerns about reputational damage and litigation risk. Consistent with this notion, we find that activism targets are more likely to experience accounting‐related lawsuits. We also find that the increased likelihood of adverse ICOs documented in our baseline tests reflects higher‐quality reporting rather than increased auditor conservatism. Overall, our findings suggest that activism campaigns spur auditor diligence while also increasing the possibility of negative outcomes that may not be fully anticipated by activist investors.

Prior studies find that delayed earnings announcements tend to communicate unfavorable news, and investors react negatively when firms delay earnings announcements. However, these findings do not explain why investors discount delayed earnings, even after controlling for the earnings news, and why firms sometimes announce good news late. Motivated by theory from Trueman (1990) that attempts to explain these phenomena, we examine whether announcement delays indicate earnings management. We predict and find that good news firms with higher discretionary accruals are more likely to announce earnings late. Consistent with post fiscal year‐end activities driving announcement delays, we fail to find a relation between measures of real earnings management and late announcements. Using a last‐chance earnings management measure based on tax expense manipulation, we also predict and find strong evidence that good news firms engaging in last‐chance earnings management are more likely to delay earnings announcements. Consistent with Trueman's (1990) theory that earnings management explains why investors discount delayed earnings announcements, we find that, on average, earnings announcement returns are 1.4% lower for late announcers relying on last‐chance earnings management to report good news. Overall, our findings suggest that announcement delays provide information about not only the sign of the earnings news but also the potential for earnings management.

We provide large‐sample archival evidence on the nature and consequences of errors deemed immaterial to the previously issued financial statements containing the errors (immaterial errors). The incidence of immaterial error corrections has been increasing since about 2004, and these corrections are associated with modestly and discernibly negative share returns that are more negative for income‐decreasing corrections and corrections that involve multiple issues. We find that immaterial errors are a leading indicator of poor reporting reliability as measured by future material and immaterial reporting errors, material weaknesses in internal controls, and SEC comment letters. Our findings suggest that immaterial errors provide researchers and investors with a more frequent and less severe indicator of potential audit or financial reporting issues as compared to more extreme reporting problems such as material errors corrected by restatements.

Using a large US sample, we find a significant and positive relation between patents and corporate tax planning, and the effect is incremental to the effect of R&D on tax planning. We employ a quasi‐natural experiment based on staggered industry‐level innovation shocks to identify the positive causal effect of patents on corporate tax planning. We also find that patents are not associated with tax planning for domestic firms, but their association with tax planning is concentrated in multinational firms, which have the ability to shift domestic income to low‐tax countries. Moreover, we find that the identified effect mainly exists in the post–check‐the‐box (CTB) rule period when shifting income among affiliates becomes more flexible and convenient. Finally, we use two income‐shifting models and find that patents, rather than R&D, facilitate tax planning through an income‐shifting channel. Overall, our results suggest that R&D and patents facilitate firms' tax planning in distinct ways: R&D facilitates tax planning as intended through tax credits and deductions, whereas patents are used by taxpayers to avoid taxes aggressively through income shifting.

This study examines the benefits of employee involvement in feedback system design for cooperation. Understanding how to enhance cooperation is important given the increasing use of team settings in practice. Control systems often provide feedback on cooperative actions of coworkers, which can help enable cooperation in teams and between organizational units. We predict that involvement in the design of feedback systems can be a source of trust between employees and enhances cooperation. This is particularly important for dynamic environments, in which an incomplete feedback system which initially provides perfect signals of cooperation no longer does so after the environment changes. Adding to prior evidence, we find that an incomplete feedback system can benefit cooperation in a static environment, but the benefit is greater when employees were initially involved in its design. In a dynamic environment, an incomplete feedback system fails to facilitate cooperation unless employees were involved in its design. Our results identify a behavioral benefit for firms that grant decision rights to employees as part of their organizational architecture.

This study evaluates whether auditor use of root cause analysis (RCA) for an identified client misstatement affects auditors' assessments of underlying control issues and materiality in an integrated audit setting. We also test whether auditor cognitive style moderates these effects given prior findings that a misfit between task structure and cognitive style undermines performance. This research is motivated by concerns about integrated audit quality and auditors failing to consider control deficiencies indicated by client misstatements. We randomly assigned 147 auditors to four RCA treatments (No RCA, Unstructured RCA, Structured “5 Whys” RCA, Structured “Fishbone” RCA). As predicted, the results suggest that auditors using (not using) structured RCA are more (less) likely to identify control‐related root causes of a financial misstatement and judge the misstatement to be more (less) material. Also consistent with our prediction, we find that the assessed severity of identified control deficiencies mediates RCA's effect on materiality judgments. Finally, the materiality judgment results reveal the expected significant interaction between structured RCA method and auditor cognitive style, suggesting the importance of allowing flexibility in the specific RCA method applied in practice. Overall, the study's results provide evidence that auditor use of RCA as a judgment framework prompts deeper evaluation of audit findings and stronger consideration of critical links between financial reporting and related internal controls in integrated audit settings.

We use a hand‐collected sample of 1,628 S&P 1500 firms and more than 12,000 executives to examine how family firms compensate nonfamily executives. Family firms comprise a large percentage of firms around the world, and most of their executives are not members of the founding family. Moreover, the founding family's engagement in the firm alters agency conflicts, which in turn should influence the design of incentive compensation. However, there is no empirical evidence on whether and how the incentive compensation of nonfamily executives differs between family and nonfamily firms. Our study intends to fill this gap in the literature. Consistent with our predictions, nonfamily executives in family firms receive significantly less performance‐based pay and equity‐based pay. Family monitoring, risk aversion, and a reluctance to dilute family ownership all contribute to the pay differences. Although incentive pay and total pay are lower in family firms, nonfamily executives receive safer pay and enjoy greater job stability. An analysis of executives' moves across firms suggests that ownership structure, not executives' preferences, is more likely the driver of pay differences between family and nonfamily firms. Our findings suggest that researchers should consider founding family's engagement to avoid misleading inferences with regard to the determinants of incentive compensation, and our findings should help compensation consultants better understand and implement pay packages for family firms and nonfamily firms. The results also imply that uniform compensation regulations intended to improve the monitoring of executives in widely held firms may not be as effective in family firms.

How is it possible that British policymakers resisted market‐based measurement for decades while financial economic concepts of decision making and valuation still gained widespread acceptance as a justification for accounting standard setting? This study introduces the concept of “technologies of financialization” to develop the theorizing of the rise of finance in the domain of accounting. Based on a genealogical history of narrative reporting in the United Kingdom, it demonstrates how references to qualitative reporting techniques helped to address recurring crises of measurement from 1969 to 1993, and ultimately contributed to the practical acceptance of market‐based measurement in the UK standard‐setting context. The data are interpreted through a cultural economy framework that directs attention to the power of referring to financial reporting as a combination of words and numbers in sustaining its theoretical redefinition “from below”—that is, by relating it to the experience of practicing accountants rather than accounting theory. As a technology of financialization, narrative reporting made financial economic ideals of market‐based measurement, decision usefulness, and future orientation appear operable in a real‐life reporting context. Whenever measurement reached its practical limits, narratives were relied on to explain the impact of price‐level changes, frame economic decisions, and relate unobservable future cash flows to present‐day strategies and resources. The insight into how narrative reporting practices have been laced into the reasoning of capital markets for over 40 years is timely because it illustrates that narratives can also play a more encompassing role and drive the turn toward wider corporate accountability on social and environmental impacts while hard measurements in this area are still being figured out.

We examine the effect of humanizing (naming) robo‐advisors on investor judgments, which has taken on increased importance as robo‐advisors have become increasingly common and there is currently little SEC regulation governing key aspects of their use. In our first experiment, we predict and find that investors are more likely to rely on the investment recommendation of an unnamed robo‐advisor, whereas they are more likely to rely on the investment recommendation of a named human advisor. Theory suggests one reason that naming a robo‐advisor may have drawbacks pertains to the complexity of the task the robo‐advisor performs. We explore the importance of task complexity in our second experiment. We predict and find that investors are less likely to rely on a named robo‐advisor when the advisor is perceived to be performing a relatively complex task, consistent with our first experiment, and more likely to rely on a named robo‐advisor when the advisor is perceived to be performing a relatively simple task, consistent with prior research on human‐computer interactions. Our findings contribute to the literature examining how technology influences the acquisition and use of financial information and the general literature on human‐computer interactions. Our study also addresses a call by the SEC to learn more about robo‐advisors. Lastly, our study has practical implications for wealth management firms by demonstrating the potentially negative effects of making robo‐advisors more humanlike in an attempt to engage and attract users.

Understanding the association between quasi‐indexer ownership and insider trading is important given the externalities that insider trading can impose on shareholders, the importance of quasi‐indexers in the capital markets, and their mixed monitoring incentives. The prior literature has produced an inconsistent set of results regarding this association. These results are difficult to interpret because the association between them is likely endogenous, and prior studies have not employed effective identification strategies to address this issue. In this study, we examine the effects of quasi‐indexer institutional ownership on insider trading using the plausibly exogenous discontinuity in quasi‐indexer ownership around the Russell 1000/2000 index cutoff. Using both regression discontinuity and instrumental variable research designs, we find higher quasi‐indexer ownership leads to less insider trading (both buys and sells) and less profitable sell trades. The effects for sells are concentrated among insider trades that, ex ante, are more likely to be based on private information. Our evidence on the profitability of buys is mixed. In addition, we find firms with higher quasi‐indexer ownership are more likely to have and/or more strictly enforce blackout policies. Overall, our results suggest that quasi‐indexers can reduce the agency costs associated with insider trading through their direct and indirect monitoring activities.