Knowledge that Transforms

Abstract This paper documents the difference in asymmetric labor adjustment between male and female employees, as alluded to in the labor economics literature. Based on detailed gender-specific employment disclosures of Korean-listed firms, we report a significant presence of labor cost stickiness. Breaking labor costs down, we further show that labor cost stickiness is mainly attributable to the asymmetric adjustment of employment rather than that of wages. More importantly, this adjustment is more salient for males than it is for females, suggesting that managers tend to dismiss females to a greater extent than males during sales downturns than they recruit during sales upturns. In cross-sectional analyses, we present evidence that formal and informal institutions underlie the asymmetric labor adjustment. Lastly, gender differences in asymmetric labor adjustment widen the tenure gap across gender, which may contribute to the low likelihood of firms appointing and promoting female executives.

Abstract I investigate whether auditors engage in greater monitoring of acquirers during industry merger waves. Merger waves are periods of industry transformation (i.e., disruption) that are accompanied by greater uncertainty, limited internal and external corporate monitoring, and poorer acquisition performance. These factors threaten the quality of acquirers’ financial reports. I test whether auditors respond to these periods by increasing their effort, which improves audit quality, and by resigning from high-risk engagements to reduce their portfolio risk. For in-wave audits, I find that audit fees are higher, financial statements are less likely to be materially misstated, auditors are more likely to timely identify and report internal control deficiencies, and auditor resignations are higher. Overall, these findings are consistent with auditors adapting to merger waves and providing higher-quality corporate monitoring within the scope of their influence. Importantly, this study provides insights that broaden our understanding of auditing and M&A transactions.

Abstract We conjecture that a greater opportunity for audit partners to share personal industry knowledge with each other within audit offices is associated with higher audit quality. Using Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (PCAOB) Form AP data, we analyze each partner’s client portfolio and construct sharing measures. First, we find extant measures of an audit office’s industry market share, industry portfolio share, and industry diversity are quite noisy in inferring our sharing measures. Next, we perform multivariate analyses and find negative associations between the opportunity to share industry knowledge and both restatements and absolute abnormal accruals. Further, we find this association varies cross-sectionally with other important auditor and client characteristics. Taken together, our evidence is consistent with a positive association between the opportunity for partners to share their industry knowledge with each other and audit quality.

Abstract Insurers can boost their earnings by accruing interest income from their corporate bond investments. We document that insurers have higher corporate bond investments as well as less equity and cash holdings, when their parents meet or just beat analysts’ quarterly earnings forecasts, compared to when their parents miss or comfortably beat the forecasts. The investment in corporate bonds to boost earnings is more pronounced when bond offerings provide more opportunities for accruing interest income, when the parent’s corporate governance is weaker, when the parent’s managers have more equity incentives, when insurers face more competition, when other earnings management techniques are used, or when the insurance segment is more important to the parent. Finally, insurers suspected of helping their parents meet or beat earnings benchmarks experience worse investment performance in subsequent years, presumably because, by investing more in corporate bonds, the insurers forgo investment opportunities with higher longer-term returns.

Abstract Research concludes that managers’ political orientation influences their decision-making and offers the political connections and risk tolerance hypotheses as explanations. We investigate partisan bias as an additional way political orientation may influence managers’ decisions. Partisan bias results in individuals whose partisan orientation aligns with that of the US president expressing more optimistic economic expectations. We examine whether partisan bias is present in managers’ annual earnings forecasts. We find that firms with CEOs whose partisanship aligns with that of the US president issue more optimistically biased annual earnings forecasts than firms with other CEOs. Higher-ability CEOs, however, are less susceptible to partisan bias. Additionally, we find that overestimating customer demand contributes to the forecast over-optimism of partisan-aligned CEOs and results in greater firm overinvestment. Furthermore, investors fail to discount the news in forecasts of partisan-aligned CEOs, and their firms’ post-forecast abnormal returns are lower.

Abstract We use a long time-series from Australia to shed light on economic factors that led to audit market concentration and the Big N. We show that increases in the size of a small number of public companies was an important factor that led to large audit firms and market concentration. We also show that emerging Big N firms made sunk cost investments, including in the ability to provide industry expertise and non-audit services, which allowed them to retain clients, differentiate, and grow. These changes occurred around the time the profession lifted restrictions on advertising, which helped facilitate differentiation, and that larger, more complex clients switched to emerging Big N firms while smaller clients switched to non-Big N firms. We do not find that increases in audit market concentration reduced competition; our results instead suggest the audit market became more competitive over time.

Abstract We develop a rating system to evaluate the quality of individual non-GAAP exclusions. Our perspective is that high-quality exclusions reflect nonrecurring economic transactions, are transitory accounting adjustments, or have little usefulness in forecasting cash flows. We use four approaches to rate exclusions. We evaluate the serial correlation of the exclusion, survey accounting academics’ views, obtain practitioner ratings from the CFA Institute, and identify the exclusions approved by the Chinese securities regulator. A firm’s exclusion quality score is the weighted average rating of its individual exclusions. For our sample of S&P 500 firms, we document that exclusion quality varies by industry, captures trends in non-GAAP reporting, and is reasonably stable at the firm level. To validate the rating, we show that firms with lower exclusion quality scores receive more SEC comment letters, incur more Regulation G violations, exhibit greater analyst forecast dispersion, and have slower price discovery following earnings announcements.

Early empirical evidence showed a lack of relative performance evaluation (RPE) for executive pay, a surprise given its theoretical appeal. We hypothesize that executive pay transparency can enhance the monitoring of pay practices and increase RPE use. We examine RPE over the two decades centered on the 2006 executive pay disclosure reforms in the United States, which stakeholders—including shareholders, proxy advisors, and compensation consultants—could use to monitor pay plans. Firms that increase disclosures exhibit a significant increase in RPE after the reforms. To understand why, we examine and document that (i) stakeholder attention to pay practices increases after the reform, (ii) stakeholder attention positively relates to increases in RPE, and (iii) say-on-pay voting confirms shareholders’ preference for RPE. Overall, our findings are consistent with executive pay transparency increasing RPE due to enhanced pay monitoring across stakeholders.

Abstract We examine whether mutual fund managers overestimate carbon risk when they are exposed to local air pollution. We find that air pollution near fund managers induces them to underweight stocks of high-emission firms. The effects strengthen among environmentally conscious fund managers and among those likely to be surprised by air pollution—consistent with the idea that managers revise their beliefs about carbon risk following exposure to air pollution. A firm’s carbon-emissions disclosures and fund managers’ sophistication moderate these effects. Carbon-intensive stocks sold by fund managers who are exposed to local air pollution subsequently outperform stocks they buy, suggesting that such underweighting is costly to fund investors.

Abstract This study examines whether auditor KAM disclosures about M&A transactions predict future performance outcomes. We find that auditors make more M&A KAM disclosures when M&A transactions are larger, involve targets with greater information asymmetry, and are subject to greater overpayment risk. When auditors disclose M&A KAMs in the acquisition year, we find an increased risk of larger goodwill impairments and that the association between acquired goodwill and changes in companies’ subsequent operating performance are significantly lower compared to when auditors do not issue an M&A KAM. We also find that the likelihood of forced CEO turnover is incrementally higher when subsequent operating performance is poor and auditors issue an M&A KAM compared to when they do not. Collectively, our findings suggest that these auditor disclosures reflect uncertainty that predicts weak post-acquisition performance and forced CEO turnover, incremental to other indicators of failed acquisition strategies.