Relevance and reliability (now referred to as “representational faithfulness”) are qualities of financial information that both the Financial Accounting Standards Board and the International Accounting Standards Board use in setting standards for financial reporting. Despite their importance, very little research has addressed how financial statement users apply these constructs. Via experiments set within the fair value context, we show that users do not view them as independent constructs. Instead, variations in properties that are associated with the reliability of a measurement influence users' assessments of the relevance of fair value. The relationship between assessed relevance and assessed reliability is unidirectional, in that factors underlying reliability influence judgments of relevance, but factors underlying relevance do not influence judgments of reliability. Our findings are important because inappropriate assessments of relevance can influence firm valuation. The results are particularly meaningful in the context of fair value because such measurements can vary widely in reliability.

Are some banks prone to perform poorly during crises? If yes, why? In this paper, we show that a bank's stock return performance during the 1998 crisis predicts its stock return performance and probability of failure during the recent financial crisis. This effect is economically large. Our findings are consistent with persistence in a bank's risk culture and/or aspects of its business model that make its performance sensitive to crises. Banks that relied more on short‐term funding, had more leverage, and grew more are more likely to be banks that performed poorly in both crises.

Some claim that rules-based accounting standards shield firms from litigation, while others argue that violations of detailed rules give plaintiffs a “roadmap” to successful litigation. We inform this debate by investigating whether rules-based standards are associated with the incidence and outcome of securities class action litigation. Overall, our results suggest that rules-based standards are associated with a lower incidence of litigation but are not associated with litigation outcomes. These results are of interest in the debate regarding the switch from a more rules-based U.S. GAAP to a more principles-based IFRS.

Premiums in health insurance markets frequently do not reflect individual differences in costs, either because consumers have private information or because prices are not risk rated. This creates inefficiencies when consumers self-select into plans. We develop a simple econometric model to study this problem and estimate it using data on small employers. We find a welfare loss of 2-11 percent of coverage costs compared to what is feasible with risk rating. Only about one-quarter of this is due to inefficiently chosen uniform contribution levels. We also investigate the reclassification risk created by risk rating individual incremental premiums, finding only a modest welfare cost.

High-performance work systems give workers more discretion, thereby increasing effort productivity but also shirking opportunities. We show experimentally that screening for work attitude and labor market competition are causal determinants of the viability of high-performance work systems, and we identify the complementarities between discretion, rent-sharing, and screening that render them profitable. Two fundamentally distinct job designs emerge endogenously in our experiments: “bad” jobs with low discretion, low wages, and little rent-sharing, and “good” jobs with high discretion, high wages, and substantial rent-sharing. Good jobs are profitable only if employees can be screened, and labor market competition fosters their dissemination.

Using path analysis, we investigate the direct and indirect links between three measures of earnings quality and the cost of equity. Our investigation is motivated by analytical models that specify both a direct link and an indirect link that is mediated by information asymmetry, but do not suggest which link would be more important empirically. We measure information asymmetry as both the adverse selection component of the bid-ask spread and the probability of informed trading (PIN). For a large sample of Value Line firms during 1993–2005, we find statistically reliable evidence of both a direct path from earnings quality to the cost of equity, and an indirect path that is mediated by information asymmetry, with the weight of the evidence favoring the direct path as the more important.

This study investigates whether the timely revelation of bad earnings news is associated with a lower incidence of litigation. The timeliness of earnings news is captured by a new measure based on the evolution of the consensus analyst earnings forecast. Holding total bad earnings news and other determinants of litigation constant, we find that earlier revelation of bad earnings news lowers the likelihood of litigation. This result holds for both settled and dismissed lawsuits. Further, we reconcile our findings with prior work that measures timeliness using managerial warnings via press releases. These tests suggest our findings are attributable to the ability of our timeliness measure to capture bad earning news revealed through disclosure channels beyond press releases. Data Availability: Data are available from public sources identified in the paper.

We investigate the relation between organization structure and the information content of short sales, focusing on founder‐ and heir‐controlled firms. Our analysis indicates that family‐controlled firms experience substantially higher abnormal short sales prior to negative earnings shocks than nonfamily firms. Supplementary testing indicates that family control characteristics intensify informed short selling. Further analysis suggests that daily short‐sale interest in family firms contains useful information in forecasting stock returns; however, we find no discernable effect for nonfamily firms. This analysis provides compelling evidence that informed trading via short sales occurs more readily in family firms than in nonfamily firms.

Systemic risk must include the housing market, though economists have not generally focused on it. We begin construction of an agent-based model of the housing market with individual data from Washington, DC. Twenty years of success with agent-based models of mortgage prepayments give us hope that such a model could be useful. Preliminary analysis suggests that the housing boom and bust of 1997-2007 was due in large part to changes in leverage rather than interest rates.

We introduce dynamic agency into the neoclassical q theory of investment. Costly external financing arises endogenously from dynamic agency, and influences firm value and investment. Agency conflicts drive a history-dependent wedge between average q and marginal q, and make the firm’s investment policy dependent on realized profits. A larger realized profit induces higher investment, and hence a larger firm. Investment is relatively insensitive to average q when the firm is “financially constrained ”(i.e. has low financial slack). Conversely, investment is sensitive to average q when the firm is relatively “financially unconstrained,” (i.e. has high financial slack). Moreover, the agent’s optimal compensation is in the form of future claims on the firm’s cash flows when the firm’s past profits are relatively low and the firm has less financial slack, whereas cash compensation is preferred when the firm has been profitable, agency concerns are less severe, and the firm is growing rapidly. To study the effect of serial correlation of productivity shocks on investment and firm dynamics, we extend our model to allow the firm’s output price to be stochastic. We show that, in contrast to static agency models, the agent’s compensation in the optimal dynamic contract will depend not only on the firm’s past performance, but also on output prices, even though they are beyond the agent’s control. This dependence of the agent’s compensation on exogenous output prices (for incentive reasons) further feeds back on the firm’s investment, and provides a channel to amplify and propagate the response of investment to output price shocks via dynamic agency.