We use data from internal assessments of audit quality in a Big 4 firm to investigate the impact of audit firm tenure and auditor‐provided non‐audit services (NAS) on audit quality. We find that first‐year audits receive lower assessments of audit quality and that quality improves shortly thereafter and then declines as tenure becomes very long. Partitioning our sample between SEC registrants and private clients, we find that the decline in audit quality in the long tenure range is attributable to audits of private clients. For audits of SEC registrants, the probability of a high quality audit reaches its maximum with very long tenure. We also find that audit fees are discounted for first‐year audits but auditor effort is higher than in subsequent years. We find no association, on average, between total NAS fees and audit quality in the full sample but observe that total NAS fees are positively associated with quality for SEC registrants and negatively associated with quality for privately held clients. Our findings are important for regulatory policies related to audit firm tenure and auditor‐provided NAS.

Some have suggested that housing policy, embodied by the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) and affordable housing goals of the government-sponsored enterprises (GSEs), caused the subprime crisis. We examine if these programs led to worse mortgage outcomes using two approaches. The first examines whether more activity by CRA-covered lenders, or more loan sales to the GSEs, was associated with worse outcomes. The second uses regression discontinuity to determine if outcomes were worse at the geographic thresholds used by each program. Our results suggest that neither program played a significant role in the subprime crisis.

A firm's lifecycle consists of birth, growth, maturity and decline. We examine the strategies that firms choose when facing financial distress and present evidence that these choices are influenced by the corporate lifecycle. This influence is most pronounced in the choice of financial restructuring strategies such as reducing dividends or changing capital structure. We also examine if the way firms face financial distress affects the likelihood of recovery. We find that reducing investment and dividends are associated with recovery for all firms, but there is little influence of lifecycle.

This study uses the quantile regression method to determine the relative importance of internal and external sources of funds in financing corporate investments across different levels of investment activities. Our findings lend support to the first (internal–external) rung of the pecking order, as investments are more responsive to internal funds than to external funds at almost all investment levels except at top investment levels. However, empirical support for the second (debt–equity) rung of the pecking order is tenuous, as investments are more responsive to equity issuance than to debt issuance at low and medium investment levels. Intriguingly, firms rely primarily on internal funds for organic growth (via capital expenditures or R&D spending), whereas they use debt capital heavily in financing acquisition-led growth. Finally, firms at high investment levels hold large cash holdings and save a significantly large fraction of equity issue proceeds as cash.

We provide a list of points to consider ( PTC s) to help researchers self‐assess whether they have addressed certain common issues that arise frequently in accounting research seminars and in reviewers’ and editors’ comments on papers submitted to journals. Anticipating and addressing such issues can help accounting researchers, especially doctoral students and junior faculty members, convert an initial empirical accounting research idea into a thoughtful and carefully designed study. Doing this also allows outside readers to provide more beneficial feedback rather than commenting on the common issues that could have been dealt with in advance. The list, provided in the appendix, consists of five sections: Research Question; Theory; Contribution; Research Design and Analysis; and Interpretation of Results and Conclusions. In each section, we include critical items that readers, journal referees, and seminar participants are likely to raise and offer suggestions for how to address them. The text elaborates on some of the more challenging items, such as how to increase a study's contribution, and provides examples of how such issues have been effectively addressed in previous accounting studies.

Many economists believe knowledge production generates positive spillovers among knowledge producers. The available evidence, however, is mixed. We argue that spillovers can exist along three dimensions: idea, geographic, and collaboration space. To isolate the key channel through which knowledge spills over, we use a unique data set to examine the impact of a large post-1992 exodus of Soviet mathematicians on the output of the nonémigrés. Although the data reveal strong competitive effects in idea space, there is evidence of knowledge spillovers in collaboration space, when high-quality researchers directly engage with other researchers in the joint production of new knowledge.

High rates of customer default on utility bills present a barrier to the expansion of electricity access in the developing world. Pre-paid electricity metering offers a technological solution to ensuring timely payment. Using an eleven-year panel of pre-paid electricity customers in Cape Town, South Africa, we describe patterns of purchase behavior across property values, our measure of socioeconomic status. Poorer households buy electricity more often, in smaller increments, and are most likely to buy on payday. These patterns suggest difficulties smoothing income, and reveal a preference for small, frequent purchases that is incompatible with a standard monthly electricity billing cycle.

In many economic, political, and social situations, circumstances change at random points in time, reacting is costly, and reactions appropriate to present circumstances may become inappropriate upon future changes, requiring further costly reaction. Waiting is informative if arrival of the next change has non-constant hazard rate. We identify two classes of situations: in the first, delayed reaction is optimal only when the hazard rate of further changes is decreasing; in the second, it is optimal only when the hazard rate of further changes is increasing. These results in semi-Markovian decision theory provide motivations for building delay into decision systems.

This paper documents the existence and characteristics of US firms that do not manufacture themselves, but nonetheless are heavily involved in the production of goods. These factoryless goods producing firms (FGPFs) are formally in the wholesale sector but, unlike traditional wholesale firms, FGPFs design the goods they sell and coordinate production activities. FGPFs in the wholesale sector are larger and younger, pay higher wages, span more sectors and had more manufacturing employment in previous years compared to traditional wholesalers. FGPFs are more likely to import than typical wholesalers, though their imports constitute a smaller share of their total domestic activity.