In recent years, firms reporting revisions of prior financial statements outnumber those reporting restatements. Misstatements that are material to prior periods are required to be reported as restatements, whereas immaterial errors can be reported as revisions. Based on SEC guidance and widely used materiality benchmarks, I find a significant percentage (29%) of revisions are suspect in that they meet at least one materiality criterion. These suspect revisions are 15% to 29% more likely to be reported when managers have a strong incentive to avoid restatements—when they face the threat of a compensation clawback for reporting a restatement. This result is especially salient when the clawback policy does not require misconduct for recoupment and when the error correction significantly reduces prior period net income. Overall, this evidence suggests that some managers use materiality discretion opportunistically to report misstatements as revisions instead of restatements.

Reviews the book "Cash Flow Accounting," edited by Barry E. Hicks and Pearson Hunt.

This paper assumes that incumbent firms can create new independent divisions more cheaply than potential entrants, who must incur the additional overhead costs of new entry. The main theoretical result is that such divisionalization ability leads perfectly informed incumbents to preempt all rational entry into their industries. In contrast, existing models of entry deterrence imply that informed incumbents, even those with steadily decreasing average costs, will often allow rational entry. Our result may explain why successful, large-scale entry by firms with no informational advantage is extremely rare. The use of divisions to preempt entry may also explain why large firms in high-profit oligopolies often divisionalize, allowing their divisions to compete freely despite the negative pecuniary externality that each division imposes on others.

This study examines the impact of cross‐firm financial statement comparability on regulatory oversight of accounting quality. Required to review each firm's periodic filings at least once every three years, the SEC learns about the degree to which a firm's accounting system is comparable to those of its peers. We posit that the SEC's ex ante knowledge about financial statement comparability, gleaned from prior‐year filing reviews, facilitates its evaluation of firms' accounting quality during the current‐year filing review. Consistent with the notion that comparable accounting systems enhance regulators' ability to identify discretionary accounting deviations, we find that the likelihood of the SEC issuing a comment letter for higher abnormal accruals increases with financial statement comparability. Further analysis reveals that the regulatory benefits from higher financial statement comparability are more salient when the SEC faces higher monitoring constraints in filing reviews. Moreover, our finding shows that comparable accounting numbers across firms help the SEC detect severe accounting violations that necessitate restatements. Overall, we provide novel evidence suggesting that higher financial statement comparability improves the efficacy of the SEC's oversight of accounting quality by reducing the information costs associated with cross‐firm comparisons.

A generalized Keynes-Hicks macromodel is used to show that, given a demand function for money which has constant price and income elasticities, the elasticity of the magnitude of demand-induced recessions with respect to the rate of secular inflation is -1. An international cross-section of developed countries indicates that the best-fitting demand function for money has constant elasticities and the best-fitting relationship between the rate of secular inflation and the magnitude of recessions indeed has a constant elasticity of about -1. The estimated gains from secular inflation, combined with a measure of the familiar Bailey losses, yield empirical estimates of optimal rates of secular inflation.