Knowledge that Transforms

In a broad sample of publicly traded firms, we observe that the share of firms annually reporting pre‐tax book losses increased from about 20% to 40% during 1988–2023. We also observe that 68% of those loss firms have positive cash tax payments (taxpaying loss firms). The amount of taxes paid by these loss firms is substantial and increasing over time. Surprisingly, we observe that taxes paid increase with the magnitude of pre‐tax losses. This study seeks to understand the prevalence of taxpaying loss firms. We examine whether both the extensive margin—the likelihood that a loss firm pays taxes—and the intensive margin—the magnitude of taxes paid—are explained by firm characteristics. We find that multinational status, state taxes, consolidation differences, goodwill impairments, asset write‐downs, extraordinary items, discontinued operations, depreciation differences, the frequency and magnitude of losses, and firm size are key determinants of both the likelihood and the amount of taxes paid by loss firms. We find that the decrease in the statutory tax rate included in the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 did not decrease the tax burden on loss firms.

We study how auditors prioritize tasks and how variations in task order influence auditors' performance. Drawing on conservation of resources theory, we develop and test our hypotheses through three experiments involving over 350 professional auditors. The first two experiments assess the impact of task order on performance. Across two settings, we manipulate task order and find that prioritizing an easier task generally results in lower performance compared with prioritizing a difficult task. In the third experiment, auditors are given autonomy over task ordering. We observe a tendency to prioritize easier tasks, particularly under heightened time pressure. We do not find any evidence that psychological ownership weakens the effect of time pressure on easy task prioritization.

The rise of independent oversight of the accounting profession has attracted considerable research attention. Much of this research has studied how professional accounting bodies and the Big 4 firms have shaped the mandate and capabilities of independent oversight bodies. Less is known about how independent oversight has affected the workings of professional accounting bodies, particularly their capacity to simultaneously govern and represent their members. This paper advances our understanding of this dynamic through a longitudinal, interpretive case study of how the Dutch professional accounting body, the NBA (the Royal Netherlands Institute of Chartered Accountants), adapted and developed its regulatory intermediary role during a lengthy period of intense oversight by the Dutch regulator, the AFM (the Authority for the Financial Markets), and shifting levels of Big 4 firm discord. Drawing on extensive archival materials and insights gained from in‐depth interviews with key participants, the study advances existing theorizations of the work of regulatory intermediaries by highlighting both their functional variability and fragility. In responding to recurring crises and critique, the NBA's intermediary role shifted from facilitation to curation and ultimately to orchestrating the Big 4 firms' regulatory response. Such shifts were neither smooth nor predictable—characterized by a sense of “role limbo” as the NBA battled to bolster its identity and authority when sidelined by the AFM or dictated to or impeded by the Big 4 firms. In examining such shifting intermediation and contesting levels of influence, the NBA's governance and representation functions emerge as more symbiotic than oppositional, with the NBA using its fulfillment of one as a means of strengthening its execution of the other. Overall, the paper's analysis uncovers the functional fragility of the NBA, which questions whether repeated calls for professional accounting bodies to rediscover their public interest mandate have adequately appreciated the complex, contested nature of the regulatory environment in which they operate.

A concentrated debt structure can facilitate creditor coordination, which reduces the financial distress cost in a liquidity default but also increases the risk of a strategic default. Debt concentration affects the sensitivity of leverage to tax through these two forces. We show that firms with a more concentrated debt structure are more responsive to state corporate income tax rate increases in increasing financial leverage, suggesting that when the tax rate increases, debt concentration's role in reducing the financial distress cost matters more. The impact of debt concentration on leverage is more pronounced when firms are subject to a high default risk, have low asset redeployability, or have a low liquidation value. Additional debt covenants can facilitate low debt concentration firms to increase leverage after tax rate increases. Our findings suggest that debt concentration is an important factor influencing the tax sensitivity of financial leverage.

We use newspapers to create Equity Market Volatility (EMV) trackers at daily and monthly frequencies. Our headline EMV tracker moves closely with the VIX and the S&P500 returns volatility in and out of sample. We exploit the volume of newspaper text to construct forty category-specific EMV trackers. News about commodity markets, interest rates, real estate markets, aggregate activity, and inflation figure prominently in EMV articles. Policy news is another major source of market volatility: 30 % of EMV articles discuss tax policy, 30 % discuss monetary policy, and 25 % refer to some form of regulation. Combining our newspaper-based trackers with textual analysis of 10-K filings, we obtain monthly firm-level risk exposure measures. These measures help explain the cross-sectional structure of realized volatilities and its evolution over time, even after conditioning on firm and time fixed effects.

We study the equity, cash, and corporate bond risk premium expectations of asset managers, investment consultants, wealth advisors, public pension funds, and professional forecasters. Subjective risk premia vary one-to-one with objective risk premia that are available in real time and countercyclical. Despite their significant time-series variation, several subjective equity premia vary more in the cross-section of institutions than in the time series. This heterogeneity persists both over time and across asset classes. We tie the heterogeneity in subjective equity return expectations to heterogeneous expectations about long-term equity valuations: some institutions believe that the price–earnings ratio behaves like a random walk, whereas others believe in varying degrees of mean reversion.

Policy uncertainty can undermine the power of government subsidies to stimulate environmentally friendly research and development. We show that Chinese firms’ green R&D falls as the uncertainty of environmental subsidies rises: Exogenous, weather-driven air pollution variability induces subsidies to fluctuate, and firms in areas with high weather-driven subsidy variability undertake less green R&D and hire fewer technical employees, controlling for the average level of subsidies. Heavy emitters and environmental technology firms are more affected. The results also illustrate how policy uncertainty can arise when policymakers are influenced by conditions that are salient but with causes that are difficult to disentangle.

We study the nature and effects of cultural biases in choice under risk and uncertainty by comparing peer-to-peer loans the same individuals ( lenders ) make alone and after observing robo-advised suggestions. When unassisted, lenders are more likely to choose co-ethnic borrowers, facing 8% higher defaults and 7.3pp lower returns. Robo-advising does not affect diversification but reduces lending to high-risk co-ethnic borrowers. Lenders in locations with high inter-ethnic animus drive the results, even when borrowers reside elsewhere. Biased beliefs explain these results better than a conscious taste for discrimination: lenders rarely override robo-advised matches to ethnicities they discriminated against when unassisted.

This paper studies the transmission of monetary policy to the stock market through investors’ discount factors. To isolate this channel, we investigate the effect of US monetary policy surprises on the ratio of prices of the same stock listed simultaneously in Hong Kong and Mainland China. We identify a strong discount rate channel driven exclusively by cycle-amplifying surprises, defined as rate cuts during easing cycles and surprise hikes during tightening cycles. A 100 basis point of such cycle-amplifying surprise induces a 30 basis point change in the price ratio within five days.

Disagreement about macroeconomic fundamentals accounts for only part of the disagreement about future interest rates, creating a “disagreement correlation” puzzle. This puzzle arises because standard equilibrium models with belief differences predict a strong link between asset return disagreement and fundamental disagreement, a link not supported by the data. We address this puzzle by introducing a model where disagreement about future demand for savings—driven by disagreement over the prevalence of patient versus impatient investors in the economy—generates asset return disagreement. Our mechanism produces stochastic yield volatility, time-varying bond risk premia, and an upward-sloping yield curve. Empirically, we construct a proxy for demand disagreement by isolating the component of yield disagreement unrelated to disagreement about macro-fundamentals. This proxy is positively related to yields and their volatilities, and predicts future bond risk premia, consistent with the predictions of our demand disagreement model.