Securities regulators frequently punish firms for their managers’ misreporting. They argue that this would enhance firms’ long-term value by mitigating underinvestment in compliance mechanisms, such as internal controls over financial reporting. Opponents of corporate penalties argue that the penalties would harm the very same investors already harmed by misreporting. We evaluate these arguments in a model with a capital market-oriented misreporting manager and a board of directors that invests in internal control quality. We identify governance transparency and board dependence as key factors that moderate the firm-value effects of corporate penalties. Internal control underinvestment occurs only if the board is severely dependent and if its choice of internal controls is opaque. Then corporate penalties curb internal control underinvestment, but they only improve long-term firm value if, additionally, internal control costs are sufficiently small (e.g., in small and less complex firms). Overall, our differentiated results have implications for regulatory enforcement policies and empirical studies on the firm-value effects of public enforcement.

Empirical studies on the relationship between shareholder litigation and corporate disclosure obtain mixed results. We develop an economic model to capture the endogeneity between disclosure and litigation. Equilibrium disclosure is determined by two countervailing effects of litigation, a deterrence effect and an insurance effect. We derive four key results. (i) Decreasing litigation risk leads to less disclosure of very bad news, due to a weakening of the deterrence effect, but to more disclosure of weakly bad news, due to a weakening of the insurance effect. (ii) Given a sufficiently large information asymmetry, litigation risk dampens (boosts) overall disclosure of bad news for low (high) litigation risk firms. (iii) Capital markets respond more to the disclosure of bad news than of good news if the deterrence effect is strong, which arises if both insiders’ penalties and litigation risk are high. (iv) In an extension, we highlight real effects of litigation on corporate innovation and establish that innovation first decreases and then increases (strictly decreases) with litigation risk if insiders’ penalties are small (large). We reconcile our findings with results from a large set of U.S.-based empirical studies and make several novel predictions.

Although internal control over financial reporting has gained increasing regulatory attention, its enforcement is far from perfect; thus, firm‐specific incentives to management become important to increase the quality of financial reports. We study how owners can motivate managers to invest in accounting quality even though it is costly to the managers. Using an agency model, we establish that a sufficiently conservative accounting system (which understates performance) is necessary to induce a manager to invest in accounting quality, and more conservatism increases this investment. The reason is that higher accounting quality mitigates the expected reduction of the manager's compensation from conservatively measured performance. Higher accounting quality makes the performance measure more precise, and the owner optimally lowers incentives, even though that entails some loss of productivity. In total, more conservatism increases both firm value and accounting quality. Our findings suggest that striving for neutral accounting can counteract incentives to improve accounting quality, and they provide support to using conservatism as a metric of financial reporting quality in empirical studies.