Knowledge that Transforms

We hypothesize and find evidence consistent with foreign firms being tax-favored acquirers of U.S. targets with greater locked-out earnings because they can avoid the U.S. tax on repatriations. This effect is economically significant; a standard deviation increase in lockout is associated with a 12% relative increase in the likelihood that an acquirer is foreign. We also find evidence that foreign acquirers of the target firms are more likely to be residents of countries that use territorial tax systems, as the tax advantages for a foreign firm acquiring a U.S. target with locked-out earnings are even greater for these acquirers.

SEC oversight of publicly listed firms ranges from comment letter (CL) reviews of firms’ reporting compliance to pursuing enforcement actions against violators. Prior literature finds that firm political connections (PC) negatively predict enforcement actions, inferring SEC capture. We present new evidence that firm PC positively predict CL reviews and substantive characteristics of such reviews, including the number of issues evaluated and the seniority of SEC staff involved. These results, robust to identification concerns, are inconsistent with SEC capture and indicate a more nuanced relation between firm PC and SEC oversight than previously suggested.

This paper examines whether and when the information environment of peer firms in an industry affects the cost of capital for other firms in the industry. We predict and find that the peer information environment is negatively associated with a firm's cost of capital when there is less publicly available firm-specific information and this negative association shrinks as the amount of firm-specific information increases. This paper provides evidence that information about peer-firms has externalities on the cost of capital for related firms and that these externalities are time-varying.

This study investigates how firm׳s bond repurchase objective affects its choice of repurchase method. Unlike tender offers, open-market repurchases are not pre-announced and buyer׳s identity is unknown to the seller. We provide evidence that firms are likely to repurchase on the open-market when bonds are mispriced and when firms seek to manage their financial reports, either to meet earnings targets or avert debt covenant violations. When firms seek to amend indenture terms, they prefer tender offers. We also find that firm׳s information quality affects the likelihood of mispricing exploitation behavior and that insiders buy firm׳s stocks around open-market repurchases.

We examine whether the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (PCAOB) international inspection program improves audit quality for a sample of non-US-listed foreign public client companies from 55 countries audited by foreign (i.e., non-US) auditors. For a sample of non-US-listed clients of PCAOB-registered foreign auditors, we find that initial PCAOB inspections improve audit quality, over and above the threat of such inspections, for foreign auditors’ non-US-listed foreign clients. Our findings document the benefits of PCAOB international inspections for foreign investors in non-US-listed foreign companies which could increase the acceptability of the PCAOB international inspection program abroad.

We examine whether auditor regulatory oversight affects the value of financial statement audits. Using the PCAOB international inspection program as a setting to generate within country variation in regulatory oversight, we find that non-U.S. auditors inspected by the PCAOB gain 4% to 6% market share from competing auditors after PCAOB inspection reports are made public. When inspection findings reveal that an auditor has many engagement-level deficiencies, market share gains following inspection reports are significantly smaller. Our evidence suggests that regulatory scrutiny increases the assurance value of an audit and highlights the role of public regulatory oversight in the audit market.

We predict that managers of firms in countries where languages do not require speakers to grammatically mark future events perceive future consequences of earnings management to be more imminent, and therefore they are less likely to engage in earnings management. Using data from 38 countries, we find that accrual-based earnings management and real earnings management are less prevalent where there is weaker time disassociation in the language. Our study is the first to examine the relation between the grammatical structure of languages and financial reporting characteristics, and it extends the literature on the effect of informal institutions on corporate actions.

We study how career concerns influence banking analysts’ forecasts. Banking analysts’ first (last) earnings forecast of the year is relatively more optimistic (pessimistic) for a bank that could be their future employer. This pattern is not observed when the same analysts forecast earnings of banks unlikely to be their future employer. We use the Global Settlement as an exogenous shock on career concerns and show that this forecast pattern is more pronounced after the Settlement. Moreover, we find evidence that analysts benefit from this behavior as analysts that are more biased in their forecasts of potential future employers are more likely to move to a higher reputation bank.

We propose a new measure of readability, the Bog Index, which captures the plain English attributes of disclosure (e.g., active voice, fewer hidden verbs, etc.). We validate this measure using a series of controlled experiments and an archival-based regulatory intervention to prospectus filing readability. We also demonstrate the importance of understanding the underlying drivers of quantity-based measures of readability. In particular, we caution researchers that a vast amount of the variation in Form 10-K file size over time is driven by the inclusion of content unrelated to the underlying text in the 10-K (e.g., HTML, XML, PDFs).

Lending concentration features prominently in models of information acquisition by banks, but empirical evidence on its role is limited. Using bank-level loan exposures, we find banks are less likely to collect audited financial statements from firms in industries and regions in which they have more exposure. These findings are stronger in settings in which adverse selection is acute and muted when the bank lacks experience with an exposure. Our results offer novel evidence on how bank characteristics are related to the type of financial information they use and support theoretical predictions suggesting portfolio concentration reveals a bank's relative expertise.