Knowledge that Transforms

We use experimental markets to test the Datar, Feltham, and Hughes (DFH) 1991 model of entrepreneur choice of auditor and retained ownership in initial public offerings (IPOs). DFH predict that entrepreneurs use retained ownership to signal IPO value and substitute high‐quality auditors for retained ownership to signal value as the risk of the IPO increases. Given the mixed support for DFH from archival research, we conduct experimental markets that directly operationalize the model's decision variables, which permits a direct test of whether the model is descriptively valid. In addition, our market setting provides a strong test of this theory by including an alternative Nash equilibrium also present in field settings, one in which only auditor quality is used by entrepreneurs to signal IPO value. Our results suggest that DFH predict entrepreneur behavior in baseline markets where both computerized investors and auditors are programmed to price consistently with the DFH equilibrium. However, the DFH model does not describe behavior when “robot” investors are replaced with human investors in the market. The results suggest that entrepreneurs and investors strategically interact in a manner that leads them away from the DFH equilibrium and toward the alternative Nash equilibrium behavior of entrepreneurs with high‐value assets hiring high‐quality auditors irrespective of IPO risk. Our results imply that the DFH model has limited descriptive validity, document the importance of strategic behavior on market equilibrium formation, and suggest that the mixed results found in prior DFH‐based field studies may reflect the model's low descriptive validity.

Our study examines the circumstances of non‐GAAP financial reporting by 492 U.S. companies that announced restatements from 1995 to 1999. We focus on income statements to analyze the occurrence and resolution of litigation over restatements and explore the role of accounting items in bringing and resolving this litigation. We provide evidence on the pervasiveness of accounting misstatements, describe their nature, and show how, if at all, they affect litigation. We assess the nature of restatements by determining whether regular, recurring earnings from primary operations (core) or other components of earnings (noncore) are misstated, and we assess their pervasiveness by estimating the number of primary accounts misstated. In our sample, companies with core restatements have higher frequencies of intentional misstatements (fraud) and subsequent bankruptcy or delisting. Likewise, these companies have, on average, more material misstatements, more negative security price reactions to restatement announcements, and more negative security price changes over the six months preceding and following restatement announcements. However, controlling for these and other factors, we find a significant association between accounting items and litigation, whether occurrences or resolutions. Specifically, core restatements — driven primarily by misstatements of revenue, a component of core earnings — and more pervasive restatements each play a role, while misstatements of noncore earnings alone do not.

This paper examines the change in the average level of moral development over a 7.5‐year period of promotion, attrition, and survival in five Big 6 firms. The study improves upon previous cross‐sectional studies that found decreases in the average level of moral development at the senior manager and partner levels, which has been referred to as the “inverted‐U” phenomenon. Problems with these studies that limit the generalizability of their findings include their cross‐sectional nature and samples that usually come from one or two firms. Over a 7.5‐year period, we found that the participating Big 6 firms retained auditors with higher average levels of moral development (measured using the defining issues test), while those with lower average levels left the firms. The average level of moral development for new partners was at least as high as the group from which they came. This research suggests that the concern about Big 6 firms retaining a higher proportion of auditors with lower moral development may be an artifact of research design.

Using matched samples of JIT adopters and nonadopters, we examine the association of JIT adoption with firms' financial reporting and tax incentives, earnings‐management histories, and LIFO reserve levels. We find evidence that adoption decisions are influenced by the interaction of firms' LIFO reserves with their income smoothing, debt covenant, and tax incentives. We also find that adoption is less likely for firms historically engaging in high degrees of earnings management, particularly when such firms have no substantial LIFO reserves. Our study extends earlier research demonstrating a relation between inventory valuation method and year‐end inventory transactions, and documents a relation between earnings‐management incentives and a fundamental supply‐chain design choice.

We assert that the tax expense is a powerful context in which to study earnings management, because it is one of the last accounts closed prior to earnings announcements. Although many pre‐tax accruals must be posted in the year‐end general ledger, managers estimate and negotiate tax expense with their auditors immediately prior to earnings announcements. We hypothesize that changes from third‐ to fourth‐quarter effective tax rates (ETRs) are negatively related to whether and how much a firm's earnings absent tax expense management miss analysts' consensus forecast, a proxy for target earnings. We measure earnings absent tax expense management as actual pre‐tax earnings adjusted for the annual ETR reported at the third quarter. We provide robust evidence that firms lower their projected ETRs when they miss the consensus forecast, which is consistent with firms decreasing their tax expense if non‐tax sources of earnings management are insufficient to achieve targets. We also find that firms that exceed earnings targets increase their ETR, but this effect is less significant. By studying the tax expense in total, rather than narrow components of deferred tax expense, our results provide general evidence that reported taxes are used to manage earnings.

We examine the robustness of information cascades in laboratory experiments. Apart from the situation in which each player can obtain a signal for free (as in the experiment by Anderson and Holt (1997), American Economic Review, 87 (5), 847–862), the case of costly signals is studied where players decide whether or not to obtain private information, at a small but positive cost. In the equilibrium of this game, only the first player buys a signal and makes a decision based on this information whereas all following players do not buy a signal and herd behind the first player. The experimental results show that too many signals are bought and the equilibrium prediction performs poorly. To explain these observations, the depth of the subjects' reasoning process is estimated, using a statistical error-rate model. Allowing for different error rates on different levels of reasoning, we find that the subjects' inferences become significantly more noisy on higher levels of the thought process, and that only short chains of reasoning are applied by the subjects.

We claim that the stock market encourages business creation, innovation, and growth by allowing the recycling of “informed capital”. Due to incentive and information problems, start-ups face larger costs of going public than mature firms. Sustaining a tight relationship with a monitor (bank, venture capitalist) allows them to finance their operations without going public until profitability prospects are clearer or incentive problems are less severe. However, the earlier young firms go public, the quicker monitors' informed capital is redirected towards new start-ups. Hence, when informed capital is in limited supply, factors that lower the costs for start-ups to go public encourage business creation. Technological spill-overs associated with business creation and thick market externalities in the young firms segment of the stock market provide prima facie cases for encouraging young firms to go public.

This paper formulates and estimates a dynamic programming model of optimal educational financing decisions. The main purpose of the paper is to measure the effect of short-term parental cash transfers, received during school, on educational borrowing and in-school work decisions, and on post-graduation lifetime earnings. The estimated parameters of the model imply that parental cash transfers do not significantly influence post-graduation lifetime earnings. Long-term factors such as family background and prior human capital investments are more important. Parental cash transfers do, however, significantly determine the decision to borrow or work during school and the level of lifetime consumption.

This paper investigates firms' incentives to invest in cost reduction in the first price sealed bid auction, a format largely used for procurement. Two central features of the model are that we allow firms to be heterogeneous and that investment is observable. We find that firms will tend to underinvest in cost reduction because they anticipate fiercer head-on competition. Using the second price auction as a benchmark, we also find that the first price auction will elicit less investment from market participants and that this is socially inefficient. These results have implications for market design when investment is important.

Procedures are presented that allow the empiricist to estimate and test asset pricing models on limited-liability securities without the assumption that thehistorical payoff distribution provides a consistent estimate of the market's priorbeliefs. The procedures effectively filter return data for unspecified historical biases in the market's priors. They do not involve explicit estimation of the market's priors, and hence, economize on parameters. The procedures derive from a new but simple property of Bayesian learning, namely: if the correct likelihood is used, the inverse posterior at the true parameter value forms a martingale process relative to the learner's information filtration augmented with the true parameter value. Application of this central result to tests of asset pricing models requires a deliberate selection bias. Hence, as a by-product, the article establishes that biased samples contain information with which to falsify an asset pricing model or estimate its parameters. These include samples subject to, "e.g." survivorship bias or Peso problems. Copyright The Review of Economic Studies Limited, 2004.