We examine auditor switching conditional on the compatibility of clients and their auditors using a unique text‐based measure of similarity of financial disclosures. We find clustering of clients within an audit firm based on this measure. We find that clients with the lowest similarity scores are significantly more likely (9.4%–10.6%) to switch auditors, and will change to an audit firm to which they are more similar. Regarding the effect on audit quality, we find that discretionary accruals are lower when similarity is higher. However, accounting restatements are more likely when text disclosures that are unaudited—business description, and management discussion and analysis (MD&A)—are more similar. We find no such similarity effect for the audited footnotes. Finally, we find that firms that are more similar are less likely to receive a going concern opinion (GCO), but the GCO reporting decision is more accurate. It is unclear if this reflects higher or lower audit quality since firms that are candidates for a GCO are intrinsically different from the average firm in an auditor's portfolio due to their financial distress. One implication of these results is that auditors might have greater involvement in the quality of the text disclosures that are currently not audited.

Mutual funds are typically grouped by their investment objectives or the ‘style’ of their managers. We propose a new empirical to the determination of manager ‘style’. This approach is simple to apply, yet it captures nonlinear patterns of returns that result from virtually all active portfolio management styles. Our classifications are superior to common industry classifications in predicting cross-sectional future performance, as well as past performance, and they also outperform classifications based on risk measures and analogue portfolios. Interestingly, ‘growth’ funds typically break down into several categories that differ in composition and strategy.

We propose financial statement similarity as a measure of financial reporting comparability. The firm‐pair version of our measure reflects the degree to which two firms report similar relations within their financial statement items; this version can help managers and market participants identify peer firms. The firm‐year version of our measure reflects the degree to which a firm reports financial statement relations that are similar to other members of its industry; this version can help market participants, regulators, and auditors screen firms for further attention. Our measure uses the presence and amounts of almost all financial items reported by a firm. We validate our measure in four sets of analyses to establish concurrent validity and in three sets of analyses to establish predictive validity. In all these tests, we contrast our measure with the comparability measure in De Franco et al. (2011) and a multivariate measure that considers the presence, but not amounts, of financial statement items. Our measure outperforms the alternatives and can be a useful tool for users.

Investors in hedge funds and commodity trading advisors (CTAs) are concerned with risk as well as return. We investigate the volatility of hedge funds and CTAs in light of managerial career concerns. We find an association between past performance and risk levels consistent with previous findings for mutual fund managers. Variance shifts depend upon relative rather than absolute fund performance. The importance of relative rankings points to the importance of reputation costs in the investment industry. Our analysis of factors contributing to fund disappearance shows that survival depends on absolute and relative performance, excess volatility, and on fund age.

We survey institutional investors about their role in capital structure decisions and views on capital structure theories. Over 82% of investors believe they influence corporate capital structure decisions, especially for smaller, younger, and more financially constrained firms. Unlike corporate managers, investors consider agency costs of free cash flow important drivers of capital structure. Investors' responses also support pecking order and market timing theories. Most investors find financial constraints important, with components of the Kaplan–Zingales and Whited–Wu indexes dominating other proxies. Overall, our findings suggest a first-order impact of investor preferences on capital structure decisions.

Natural language is a key form of business communication. Textual analysis is the application of natural language processing (NLP) to textual data for automated information extraction or measurement. We survey publications in top accounting journals and describe the trend and current state of textual analysis in accounting. We organize available NLP methods in a unified framework. Accounting researchers have often used textual analysis to measure disclosure sentiment, readability, and disclosure quantity; to compare disclosures to determine similarities or differences; to identify forward‐looking information; and to detect themes. For each of these tasks, we explain the conventional approach and newer approaches, which are based on machine learning, especially deep learning. We discuss how to establish the construct validity of text‐based measures and the typical decisions researchers face in implementing NLP models. Finally, we discuss opportunities for future research. We conclude that (i) textual analysis has grown as an important research method and (ii) accounting researchers should increase their knowledge and use of machine learning, especially deep learning, for textual analysis.

Alfred Cowles' test of the Dow Theory apparently provides strong evidence against the ability of Wall Street's most famous chartist to forecast the stock market. Cowles (1934) analyzes editorials published by the chief exponent of the Dow Theory, William Peter Hamilton. We review Cowles' evidence and find that it supports the contrary conclusion. Hamilton's timing strategies actually yield high Sharpe ratios and positive alphas for the period 1902 to 1929. Neural net modeling to replicate Hamilton's market calls provides interesting insight into the Dow Theory and allows us to examine the properties of the theory itself out of sample.

Hendricks, Patel, and Zeckhauser (1997) (HPZ) find that the response of current to past returns for mutual funds in the presence of survivorship is nonlinear. In our rejoinder to their paper, we verify their results through simulation, provide some intuition for why the result is true, and evaluate the power of their proposed test based upon the J - shape pattern. Theirs is a useful contribution to the growing literature about the issue of survival biases in empirical finance. It may help to explain puzzling results reported in the mutual fund literature, and may provide a guide for future experimental design. Our investigation of the HPZ results led us to a more complete understanding of how differential volatility affects survival - conditioned returns. Our simulations of the test statistic proposed by HPZ suggest that the power of the test is dependent on the absolute level of the threshold, as well as on the magnitude of the cross - sectional differences in variance. While it would be useful to have a reliable test of the conjecture that survivorship is not driving an observed empirical result, we are only beginning to understand the kind of empirical regularities that survival may induce.

Mandatory disclosure is a regulatory tool intended to allow market participants to assess operational risk. We examine the value of disclosure through the controversial SEC requirement, since overturned, which required major hedge funds to register as investment advisors and file Form ADV disclosures. Leverage and ownership structures suggest that lenders and equity investors were already aware of operational risk. However, operational risk does not mediate flow‐performance relationships. Investors either lack this information or regard it as immaterial. These findings suggest that regulators should account for the endogenous production of information and the marginal benefit of disclosure to different investment clienteles.