We examine whether information in footnotes might lack reliability because auditors permit more misstatement in disclosed, as opposed to recognized, amounts. In both the stock-compensation and lease settings, audit partners require greater correction of misstatements in recognized amounts than in the equivalent disclosed amounts. Debriefing questions indicate that the partners make these decisions knowingly, even though they expect greater client resistance to correcting recognized amounts, because they view recognized amounts as more material. Partners also spend more time on correction decisions for recognized information. While prior literature suggests that amounts are often relegated to footnotes because they are less reliable, our results suggest that the actual choice to disclose versus recognize can also reduce information reliability. These results have implications for the interpretation of prior research on the reliability of recognized and disclosed numbers, for financial-accounting standard setters who may want to consider the reliability effects of their recognition versus disclosure decisions, and for auditing standard setters who may wish to clarify auditors' responsibilities for preventing misstatements in disclosed amounts.

abstract Researchers and practitioners in accounting and finance often investigate or advocate particular disciplined trading strategies, but little work investigates the determinants of individual investors' trading‐strategy reliance. We report two experiments, which provide evidence that the dual‐source model of overconfidence (Sniezek and Buckley [1991]) predicts the circumstances in which investors are more likely to rely on disciplined trading strategies. Our results indicate that reliance is more likely when investors trade portfolios of securities rather than trading on a case‐by‐case basis, particularly when investors have received feedback that their previous (unaided) trading decisions have been unprofitable. These results are driven by the number of shares that investors transact rather than by investors' directional agreement with the recommendations of the trading strategy, suggesting that the effects of a portfolio approach and trading experience occur by mitigating investors' overconfidence. The effects violate an aspect of economic rationality because our experiments ensure that investors in all conditions trade the same set of securities based on the same set of information.

In response to recommendations by the AICPA Special Committee on Financial Reporting and the Association for Investment Management and Research, the FASB recently invited comment regarding the question, “Given [efficient] markets, would any disservice be done to the interests of individual investors by allowing professional investors access to more extensive information?” [AICPA (1996) Report of the Special Committee on Financial Reporting and the Association for Investment Management and Research, New York, p. 22]. Research in psychology [e.g. Griffin & Tversky (1992) The weighing of evidence and the determinants of confidence. Cognitive Psychology, 411–435] suggests that less-informed investors may suffer from over-confidence and trade too aggressively given their information. This paper reports on an experiment designed to address these issues. In the experiment, security values are determined by the price/book ratios of actual firms, “more-informed” investors observe three value-relevant financial ratios derived from Value-Line reports, and “less-informed” investors observe only one of those signals. Even after market prices have stabilized after many rounds of trading, less-informed investors systematically transfer wealth to more-informed investors as a result of biased prices and overly aggressive trading. However, alerting less-informed investors to the extent of their informational disadvantage eliminates these welfare losses. The results thus suggest that providing information to only professional investors could harm the welfare of less-informed investors if less-informed investors are not aware of the extent of their informational disadvantage.

This paper reports analyses of data obtained using a field-based questionnaire in which 253 auditors from one Big 5 firm recalled and described 515 specific experiences they had with clients who they believe were attempting to manage earnings. This approach enables us to analyze separately managers' decisions about how to attempt earnings management and auditors' decisions about whether to prevent earnings management by requiring adjustment of the financial statements. Our results indicate that managers are more likely to attempt earnings management, and auditors are less likely to adjust earnings management attempts, which are structured (not structured) with respect to precise (imprecise) standards. We also find that managers are more likely to make attempts that increase current-year income, but auditors are more likely to require that those attempts be adjusted, that managers are more likely to make attempts that decrease current-year income with unstructured transactions and/or when standards are imprecise, and that auditors are more likely to require adjustment of attempts that they identify as material or that are attempted by small clients.

ABSTRACT In the published proceedings of the first Journal of Accounting Research Conference, Vatter [1966] lamented that “Gathering direct and original facts is a tedious and difficult task, and it is not surprising that such work is avoided.” For the fiftieth JAR Conference, we introduce a framework to help researchers understand the complementary value of seven empirical methods that gather data in different ways: prestructured archives, unstructured (“hand‐collected”) archives, field studies, field experiments, surveys, laboratory studies, and laboratory experiments. The framework spells out five goals of an empirical literature and defines the seven methods according to researchers’ choices with respect to five data gathering tasks. We use the framework and examples of successful research studies in the financial reporting literature to clarify how data gathering choices affect a study's ability to achieve its goals, and conclude by showing how the complementary nature of different methods allows researchers to build a literature more effectively than they could with less diverse approaches to gathering data.

Abstract This paper reports an experiment demonstrating that MBA students overrely on old earnings performance when predicting future earnings performance in a laboratory setting. In the experiment, MBA students relied too heavily on old annual ROE information to predict future annual ROE. The experiment shows how a common cognitive error (overreliance on unreliable information) interacts with the structure of the earnings time series to create particular patterns of prediction errors. The results also suggest directions for research on two well‐known anomalies, long‐run overreactions (De Bondt and Thaler 1985, 1987) and post‐earnings‐announcement drift (Bernard and Thomas 1990).

ABSTRACT This paper examines audit team leader reactions to auditors who speak up about potentially important audit issues. Study 1 is a survey of interacting audit teams and provides evidence of higher performance evaluations for auditors who speak up. Studies 2, 3, and 4 are experiments examining team leader reactions to speaking up, both at the time speaking up occurs (Study 2) and later, during performance evaluation (Studies 2, 3, and 4). Results provide evidence that team leaders react with irritation at the time speaking up occurs, particularly if a team member raises an audit effectiveness issue that could increase audit effort. However, team leaders reward speaking up in performance evaluations, particularly when team members speak up about issues that align with the effectiveness or efficiency focus of the team. While supervisors' performance evaluations exhibit outcome effects, supervisors also reward speaking up, regardless of outcome. Data Availability: Contact the authors.

ABSTRACT We report the results of four experiments investigating the relationship between (1) the quality of an audit, (2) jurors' assessments of the standard of prudent care (SOC) against which audit quality is compared, and (3) jurors' negligence verdicts. Experiment 1 operationalizes audit quality by varying the sample size used in audit testing, and provides evidence that jurors anchor their assessment of SOC on audit quality, producing a “competitive mediation” in which audit quality reduces the potential for a negligence verdict directly, but increases that potential indirectly by increasing SOC. Experiment 2 generalizes this finding to a setting that operationalizes audit quality by varying the size of adjustment the auditor required. Experiments 3 and 4 extend these results to a setting in which SOC is elicited after jurors make negligence verdicts. Overall, these experiments provide insight into the role of SOC in constraining and justifying negligence verdicts. Data Availability: Contact the authors.