Knowledge that Transforms

This paper examines the incentive effects of a mandatory personal deductible in liability insurance contracts for directors and officers (D&Os). Exploiting a novel German law that mandates personal deductibles for executives, we document positive returns for affected firms around the first announcement of the plan to impose a personal deductible. We also find evidence of long-run effects: affected firms decrease risk taking in operational activities and financial reporting, and improve the quality of takeover decisions. Our study shows that the structure of D&O insurance contracts matters because mandating that D&Os have “skin in the game” appears to lead to real effects on firm value.

The rise of credit default swaps (CDS) provides creditors with a market-based approach to obtaining protection, but it can also affect lenders' monitoring of the borrowers. We find that after CDS begin trading on a given firm, new loans to that firm are less likely to require collateral and have less strict financial covenants, even controlling for endogeneity. The effects are stronger when lenders have easier access to CDS, for safer firms, credit lines, and performance-based covenants. Our evidence is consistent with the theory that the introduction of CDS trading makes loan contracting more effective for better quality borrowers.

We find that firms’ tax planning exhibits strategic reactions: firms respond to changes in their industry-competitors’ tax planning by changing their own tax planning in the same direction. We document evidence of these strategic reactions in two distinct research settings that entail an exogenous increase and decrease in competitors’ tax planning. We also find evidence that strategic reactions stem from concerns about appearing more tax aggressive than industry competitors, some evidence that they stem from firms learning from the tax planning of their industry competitors, and no consistent evidence that they stem from leader-follower dynamics.

This discussion of the survey of the literature on financial reporting and corporate investment by Roychowdhury et al. (2019) focuses on an area in this literature that has received less attention—how financial reporting helps managers allocate capital across investment opportunities within their firms in the presence of uncertainty. We discuss the theory on investment under uncertainty and offer suggestions for future research.

Certain financial statement items are closely related, such as items in hedging relationships. In this paper, we develop theory and conduct two experiments to investigate three different balance sheet presentation formats for related financial statement items. We posit that a linked presentation format rarely used in practice allows financial statement users to better distinguish among firms with different economics. Neither net presentation nor separate presentation of related balance sheet items allows users to make this distinction. The results of two experiments—one in a hedging context and the other in a lending context—support our theory-based predictions.

Relative performance evaluation (RPE) compensates managers on their relative performance against a peer group. Since observing more peers’ performance allows managers to better estimate the performance level required to achieve RPE targets, we conjecture that releasing earnings later than peers facilitates managers to achieve targets by exploiting last-minute reporting discretion. Empirical evidence is consistent with our conjecture. Further, managers tend to select peers that release earnings more timely and delay own firms’ earnings releases to be later than peers’ after RPE adoption. Our evidence suggests strategic timing of earnings release and discretionary reporting in response to relative performance evaluation.

A fundamental question in accounting is whether and to what extent financial reporting facilitates the allocation of capital to the right investment projects. Over the last two decades, a large and growing body of literature has contributed to our understanding of whether and why financial reporting affects investment decision-making. We review the empirical literature on this topic, provide a framework to organize this literature, and highlight opportunities for future research.

Audit firms are organized as collections of geographically decentralized offices. Decentralization allows for increased proximity between offices and clients, improving the efficiency of auditors' interactions with client personnel. Yet decentralization also decreases the proximity between offices within each firm, potentially impeding auditors’ interactions with each other. We show that decreased proximity between offices reduces inter-office audit quality “spillovers” and that this effect is driven primarily by reduced monitoring and knowledge sharing. Our findings expand the “within office” view of audit production by demonstrating the importance of interactions between offices and the role of geographic proximity in facilitating them.

Investor uncertainty about firm value drives investors’ information collection and trading activities, as well as managers’ disclosure choices. This study examines an important source of uncertainty that likely cannot be influenced by most managers and investors: uncertainty about government economic policy. We find that this uncertainty is associated with increased bid-ask spreads and decreased stock price reactions to earnings surprises. Managers respond to this uncertainty by increasing their voluntary disclosures, but these disclosures only partly mitigate the bid-ask spread increase. We conclude that government economic policy uncertainty is an important component of firms’ information environments and managers’ voluntary disclosure decisions.