This paper discusses evidence on the costs of the Sarbanes–Oxley Act (SOX) from stock returns and going-private decisions. Zhang, [2007. Economic consequences of the Sarbanes–Oxley Act of 2002. Journal of Accounting and Economics, doi:10.1016/j.jacceco.2006.07.002] analyzes returns around legislative events and concludes that SOX imposes significant costs on firms. Engel, et al. [2007. The Sarbanes–Oxley Act and firms’ going-private decisions. Journal of Accounting and Economics, doi:10.1016/j.jacceco.2007.02.002] examine going-private decisions and point to unintended consequences. Both studies are carefully conducted and deserve praise for tackling an important issue. However, as my discussion highlights, several key findings may not be attributable to SOX and we should exercise caution in interpreting the evidence. While it is not implausible that one-size-fits-all regulation imposes substantial costs on firms, we presently do not have much SOX-related evidence to support this conclusion.

This paper examines banks’ disclosures and loss recognition in the 2007–2009 financial crisis and identifies several core issues for the link between accounting and financial stability. We show that, going into the financial crisis, banks’ disclosures about relevant risk exposures were relatively sparse. Such disclosures came later after major concerns about banks’ exposures had arisen in markets. The recognition of loan losses also was slow and delayed relative to prevailing market expectations. Among the possible explanations for this evidence, our analysis indicates that banks’ reporting incentives played a key role, which has important implications for bank supervision and the new expected loss model for loan accounting. We also provide evidence that shielding regulatory capital from accounting losses through prudential filters can dampen banks’ incentives for corrective actions. Overall, our analysis reveals several significant challenges if accounting and financial reporting are to contribute to financial stability.

This study collates potential economic effects of mandated disclosure and reporting standards for corporate social responsibility (CSR) and sustainability topics. We first outline key features of CSR reporting. Next, we draw on relevant academic literatures in accounting, finance, economics, and management to discuss and evaluate the potential economic consequences of a requirement for CSR and sustainability reporting for U.S. firms, including effects in capital markets, on stakeholders other than investors, and on firm behavior. We also discuss issues related to the implementation and enforcement of CSR and sustainability reporting standards as well as two approaches to sustainability reporting that differ in their overarching goals and materiality standards. Our analysis yields a number of insights that are relevant for the current debate on mandatory CSR and sustainability reporting. It also points scholars to avenues for future research.

We investigate the impact of reporting regulation on corporate innovation. Exploiting thresholds in Europe's regulation, we find that forcing firms to disclose financial statements reduces the number of innovating firms and the average firm's innovation spending, but it does not reduce industry-wide total innovation spending. Our results suggest that the regulation imposes proprietary costs on firms, which discourages innovation activity, especially by smaller firms. We also show that the regulation provides positive information spillovers to other firms (e.g., competitors, suppliers, and customers), especially larger ones. We complement our analysis with alternative innovation measures, including patents, and corroborate the results with an analysis of reporting changes due to an enforcement reform in Germany. In sum, the European reporting regulation has aggregate and distributional effects on corporate innovation. Importantly, it appears to concentrate innovative activities among fewer, mostly larger firms, which could reflect institutional features of our setting or more general economic forces.

This paper examines the economic consequences of mandatory International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) reporting around the world. We analyze the effects on market liquidity, cost of capital, and Tobin's q in 26 countries using a large sample of firms that are mandated to adopt IFRS. We find that, on average, market liquidity increases around the time of the introduction of IFRS. We also document a decrease in firms' cost of capital and an increase in equity valuations, but only if we account for the possibility that the effects occur prior to the official adoption date. Partitioning our sample, we find that the capital‐market benefits occur only in countries where firms have incentives to be transparent and where legal enforcement is strong, underscoring the central importance of firms' reporting incentives and countries' enforcement regimes for the quality of financial reporting. Comparing mandatory and voluntary adopters, we find that the capital market effects are most pronounced for firms that voluntarily switch to IFRS, both in the year when they switch and again later, when IFRS become mandatory. While the former result is likely due to self‐selection, the latter result cautions us to attribute the capital‐market effects for mandatory adopters solely or even primarily to the IFRS mandate. Many adopting countries make concurrent efforts to improve enforcement and governance regimes, which likely play into our findings. Consistent with this interpretation, the estimated liquidity improvements are smaller in magnitude when we analyze them on a monthly basis, which is more likely to isolate IFRS reporting effects.

A simple proxy for a bank’s credit risk – the average physical distance of small corporate borrowers from their bank’s branches – suggests risky lending before the global financial crisis was pro-cyclical and especially so in banks operating in counties where banking was competitive. Surprisingly, such lending took off as the Fed raised interest rates between 2004 and 2007. We argue that bank responses to the rate hikes led to a shift of bank deposits into counties where banking was competitive. Short-horizon bank management recycled these new deposits into loans to more distant counties where banking was not competitive. Unfortunately, given the difficulty of making distant small business loans, loan quality deteriorated. We discuss the conditions under which a normalization of interest rates can lead to a deterioration in loan quality.

We examine the capital-market effects of changes in securities regulation in the European Union aimed at reducing market abuse and increasing transparency. To estimate causal effects for the population of E.U. firms, we exploit that for plausibly exogenous reasons, such as national legislative procedures, E.U. countries adopted these directives at different times. We find significant increases in market liquidity, but the effects are stronger in countries with stricter implementation and traditionally more stringent securities regulation. The findings suggest that countries with initially weaker regulation do not catch up with stronger countries, and that countries diverge more upon harmonizing regulation. (