Knowledge that Transforms

We examine the “black box” of corporate tax risk management by providing unique insights into practitioners' tax risk perceptions, tax risk management practices, and influences leading to variation in tax risk management practices across firms. Opening this black box is important as tax risk has become an increasingly relevant aspect in corporate tax practice—little is yet known about how firms define and manage tax‐related risks. We perform our analysis based on 33 expert interviews, which we conducted with 42 tax risk experts. The first important finding from our interviews is that tax risk is a multifaceted and context‐dependent construct, consisting of six tax risk components: financial, reputational, compliance, political, tax process, and personal liability risk. Furthermore, we find that perceived tax risk varies substantially between corporate insiders and corporate outsiders. Our interview insights further reveal that firms' most frequently used tax risk management practices relate to some form of tax communication. The tax departments' rationale for using tax communication as a key tax risk management practice is to protect the firm—in particular, the CFO—from three types of pressure: public pressure, peer pressure, and regulatory pressure. Our analysis has important implications for future studies. First, our insights reveal that several tax risk components are not sufficiently covered by common tax risk measures used by the archival literature. Second, we find that communication has a key role in managing tax risk. This deviates from the purely supportive role that extant risk management frameworks have assigned to communication.

This paper examines the pricing efficiency of 8‐K filings for events other than earnings announcements. Since these filings provide timely information that is material to investors and explain variations in quarterly returns to a degree similar to other disclosures, understanding how the stock price absorbs their information is important for investors, regulators, and academics. By testing the statistical correlation between the immediate stock returns in response to these filings and subsequent stock returns before, during, and after the forthcoming earnings announcement, we find evidence of investor overreaction to good news but underreaction to bad news in the immediate window. Essentially, the price increases too much for good news but fails to decrease enough for bad news, resulting in overpricing for both. Most of the correction for this overpricing occurs in the period leading up to the forthcoming earnings announcement, while the rest happens during the announcement. Drawing on Miller (1977), we further illustrate that, in the presence of short‐sale constraints, increase in investor disagreement spurred by interpretation difficulty is the most likely mechanism for the observed overpricing. We fail to find sufficient evidence in support of alternative mechanisms, including managerial disclosure strategies, analyst optimistic bias, and retail investor participation. This asymmetric mispricing for non‐earnings 8‐Ks contrasts with the symmetric mispricing commonly found for other types of disclosures, where investors either systematically underreact or overreact to public information. Our results could broadly speak to the pricing of other public information that is inherently difficult to interpret.

We examine whether audit firm alma mater ties between the auditor and the audit committee (AC) are associated with significantly greater nonaudit services (NAS) provided by the auditor. We further examine whether greater NAS in the presence of such alma mater ties are associated with audit quality. Since the AC is responsible for approving and monitoring the services provided by the auditor, the presence of AC and auditor alma mater ties underscores the controversies surrounding such ties' undermining audit quality. Predicating our hypotheses on social ties theory, we find a positive association between the presence of an audit firm alumnus on the AC and NAS acquired from the alma mater auditor. We further find that this association becomes stronger as the tenure of the alumnus increases. Next, using multiple measures of audit quality, we find that, when the alumnus on the AC is associated with significantly more NAS provided by the alma mater audit firm, the quality of the audit suffers. Collectively, our results suggest that audit firm alma mater ties between the AC and auditor engender economic ties that adversely affect audit quality. Our study provides new evidence on the channels through which the quality of the audit is affected and raises important implications for the composition of the AC, auditor‐provided NAS, and client assignment to engagement partners.

Conventional agency theory suggests that firms should benchmark CEO compensation to absorb systemic risk and to more efficiently incentivize executives to work hard. Yet empirical research has found only a modest use of benchmarking in CEO compensation contracts. In this paper, I highlight one weakness of relative performance evaluation (RPE). When earnings management is possible, benchmarking creates stronger incentives for misreporting performance measures compared to benchmark‐independent pay. The optimal contract will depend less on a correlated benchmark (e.g., a stock market index) if it is easier for the manager to misreport performance. Thus, the model predicts that firms with weak internal controls and bad auditors are less likely to use RPE, offering a theoretical explanation for the empirically observed lack of RPE use.

Accounting rules require that certain R&D expenditures be capitalized, but academic research often states that all R&D expenditures must be immediately expensed. An accurate understanding of actual R&D accounting practices is critical because that understanding influences research questions and design choices. To examine the competing R&D accounting perspectives, we survey 184 experienced financial officers. Our survey reveals that R&D capitalization is common and extensive in practice. Over 90% of respondents indicate that their firm capitalizes at least some R&D expenditures, and our evidence shows that about 22% of annual R&D expenditures are capitalized. When facing an earnings shortfall, respondents indicate that firms are often willing to cut R&D expense. However, respondents also indicate an unwillingness to cut types of R&D expenses that cause long‐term harm—for example, laying off scientists or delaying the execution of trials—and they often redirect the freed‐up R&D resources to R&D expenditures that are capitalized. Using archival data, we also corroborate our survey finding about the pervasiveness of capitalized R&D, and we demonstrate its empirical implications. Our study helps to align the characterization of R&D accounting rules in the academic literature with the authoritative professional literature and provides a more nuanced understanding of firms’ R&D response to an earnings shortfall.

We investigate what happens when accounting professionals come under external pressure to change established practices. We focus on corporate tax transparency, which has become an important battleground as stakeholders increasingly demand more information on corporate tax practices. While the Big 4 global accounting firms have traditionally played a dominant role in shaping what is perceived as acceptable corporate tax behavior, activists and critical politicians have recently mobilized public attention, challenging how accounting professionals legitimate their practices. We provide evidence of these challenges from 33 interviews and participation in 13 professional events from 2013 to 2019. We conceive of the confrontation between dominant professionals and challengers as taking place in a transnational “field,” where a range of actors struggle over how a common object—corporate tax transparency—is defined and treated. This approach helps us understand how the Big 4 navigate new challenges while seeking to maintain control over professional practices. Our interviews and observations show that Big 4 professionals are sensitive to political challenges, requiring that they engage in what we characterize as “scanning work”—ongoing activity to search for, identify, and assess challenges—to fend off outside interventions. Our analysis has important implications for further research. First, the need for scanning work when facing transnational political pressure implies a different way of seeing interactions between accounting professionals and (global) society at large. Second, viewing global accounting from a transnational field lens helps us identify complex sources of change external to already‐powerful actors.

In this study, we examine whether a country's implementation of major corporate governance reforms affects firms' cross-listing activities. Cross-listing is important in overcoming international investment barriers and thus it is worth investigating whether enhanced corporate governance at the country level contributes to the integration of international capital markets. Using a difference-in-differences (DiD) research design, we predict and find that following the implementation of corporate governance reforms in their home countries, firms are more likely to engage in cross-listing activities and tend to cross-list in host countries with stronger investor protection and more developed markets than those in countries with no reforms in the same period. The results from country-level cross-sectional tests indicate that this effect is greater for firms in home countries with weaker investor protection and less developed stock markets in the prereform period. The reforms also have a stronger effect on firms subject to less analyst following and greater external finance dependence. Finally, we find a stronger association between cross-listing activities and institutional ownership after the reforms. Taken together, this study increases understanding of the trade-off between cross-border capital supply and demand. Our finding suggests that country-level corporate governance plays an important role in facilitating the supply of cross-border capital, which in turn incentivizes firms to cross-list. Our study also offers policy implications for national stock exchanges and securities regulators by suggesting that countries without well-developed capital markets should strengthen their corporate governance to improve firms' ability to raise external financing and attract cross-border capital flows.

This study provides evidence that hedge accounting information under Statement of Financial Accounting Standards (SFAS) 133, Accounting for Derivative Instruments and Hedging Activities , is related to rivals' market entry decisions. Documenting accounting information's relevance to competition decisions requires context‐specific settings. Using data for the airline industry in the United States, I predict and find that entrants are less likely to enter routes in which incumbents report higher accumulated other comprehensive income from fuel hedging, an indication of lower future operating costs. As predicted, this relation is stronger after the adoption of SFAS 161, Disclosure about Derivative Instruments and Hedging Activities , in 2008, a systemic shock that significantly increases risk management disclosure requirements. The findings illustrate the product market relevance of hedge accounting signals and disclosure in the US airline industry and extend the understanding of SFAS 133 and SFAS 161 beyond the capital markets.

Errors reflect unintended deviations from plans or goals and commonly carry negative connotations. Although errors cannot be eliminated, they offer opportunities for learning and innovation. Audit firms employ powerful mechanisms, such as review processes, to prevent or detect audit errors and safeguard their work in the public interest. At the same time, the profession recognizes positive long‐term outcomes of errors in terms of continuous learning to enhance auditor skills and, ultimately, audit quality. The current study employs semistructured interviews with Dutch auditors to investigate how they manage the tensions emanating from extant public and regulatory demands for flawless audits while embracing errors as opportunities for learning. Our findings reveal that auditors express a positive attitude toward openly communicating audit errors, but, in substance, they espouse negative emotions and defensive strategies for fear of repercussions. We argue that the excessive emphasis audit firms and oversight bodies place on error prevention conditions auditors into perceiving errors as negative and avoidable events. We assert these attitudes result from the profession's efforts to maintain status and legitimacy in the eyes of the public and the regulator, where any auditor error may shed doubt on auditors' work in the public interest. In sum, our findings indicate that viewing errors as incompatible with audit work makes the profession susceptible not only to repeating errors but also to missing out on opportunities to improve services and to achieve innovation.

We conduct two experiments to investigate the joint effect of two justification factors of earnings management—namely, attribution for the firm's underperformance and benefits accruing to other employees from inflating reported earnings. This investigation is important because prior research examines the effects of individual justification factors, whereas real‐world settings entail more complexity involving multiple justification factors. In Experiment 1, we predict and find that managers are more likely to manage earnings when the firm's underperformance is caused by an external event and misreported earnings benefit other employees besides the reporting manager. Furthermore, we show that the extent to which participants use moral justifications mediates the effect of benefits sharing on earnings management, but only when causal attribution is external, and that it mediates the effect of causal attribution on earnings management, but only when benefits are shared. In Experiment 2, we use a neutral control condition that makes no mention of inconsistent incentives to demonstrate that it is the combination of causal attribution and benefits sharing that triggers earnings management. We contribute to the accounting and psychology literature by proposing and testing a theory that explains how multiple justification factors interact to cause opportunistic behavior. Our results suggest that policy‐makers and governing parties should consider developing a holistic view of possible justification factors, focusing on situational opportunities created by combinations of factors rather than individual factors alone.