The unique regulation of U.S. public pension funds links their liability discount rate to the expected return on assets, which gives them incentives to invest more in risky assets in order to report a better funding status. Comparing public and private pension funds in the United States, Canada, and Europe, we find that U.S. public pension funds act on their regulatory incentives. U.S. public pension funds with a higher level of underfunding per participant, as well as

Managers frequently attribute the news in their earnings forecasts to various economic events. Using textual analysis, we identify the economic factors underlying earnings news from press releases. We document a wide range of industry‐wide shocks and firm‐specific actions to which the earnings news in management forecasts is attributed. As expected, earnings attributions significantly affect peer firms’ price reactions to the earnings news. Specifically, earnings news attributed to industry‐wide trends or firm structural changes leads to positive information transfers but earnings news attributed to firm competitive moves triggers negative information transfers. Information transfers are much stronger when each economic factor is mentioned the first time in a given industry‐year. Further analysis reveals that the strength of information transfers varies with firm‐level rivalry within the industry (i.e., similar business strategies, market position, and level of competition).

We examine whether managerial sentiment is associated with errors in accrual estimates. Using public banks we find (1) managerial sentiment is negatively associated with loan loss provision estimates, (2) future charge-offs per dollar of provision are positively associated with sentiment when the provision is estimated, and (3) the effects of sentiment are greater for firms with more uncertain charge-offs. Results are similar for private banks, suggesting accrual manipulation related to capital market incentives is unlikely to explain the results. Although economic fundamentals explain most of the variation in the provision, we find sentiment has an incremental and economically meaningful effect.

Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Search Site Cite View This Citation Add to Citation Manager Citation Patrick J. Harvey; Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike. The Accounting Review 1 July 2017; 92 (4): 269–272. https://doi.org/10.2308/accr-10538 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentThe Accounting Review Search Advanced Search

Using a sample of firms from France, where the law requires the use of two auditors, we study the effect of auditor pair composition on audit quality by examining a specific account, goodwill impairment. We document that firms audited by a Big 4–non‐Big 4 auditor pair ( BS ) are more likely to book an impairment and book a larger impairment than firms audited by a Big 4–Big 4 auditor pair ( BB ) when low‐performance indicators suggest a greater likelihood of impairment. Moreover, firms audited by a BB pair reduce impairment disclosures when they book impairments, while firms audited by a BS pair do not, suggesting lower transparency for firms audited by a BB pair. Our results inform investors and firms in mandatory joint audit regimes, as well as regulators who are considering requiring joint audits.

We estimate the effect of endogenous training participation on transitions in and out of employment for disadvantaged women in the Job Training Partnership Act (JTPA) study. Decomposing the effect of training on employment into its effects on transitions in and out of employment has the potential to develop more effective programs. We also consider a potentially serious identification problem that arises when individuals do not undertake training immediately, and we propose a test to shed light on this problem. We find that this problem is not important in our context. JTPA classroom training substantially reduced unemployment durations, and thus it complements programs that increase employment durations.

Many researchers use the G-index or E-index to measure firms' takeover defenses. Others argue that these indices are not related to firms' takeover likelihoods. We find that, unlike their raw values, the instrumented versions of these indices are significantly and negatively related to acquisition likelihood. The difference between the raw and instrumented results indicates that the G-index and E-index include an endogenous component and highlights the importance of accounting for endogeneity in tests that use takeover indices to measure takeover deterrence. We provide data on new instruments that researchers can use to address these issues.

Bonds with either fixed price or make whole call provisions allow for the efficient recontracting of claims, but they differ in terms of their ability to mitigate debt agency costs. Controlling for the influence of bondholder-shareholder conflicts on both the level of covenant protection and selection of a particular type of call provision, we show that firms select call provisions with greater sensitivity to changes in the option-free value of the bond when agency problems are more severe. Our findings are consistent with the Barnea, Haugen and Senbet (1980) theorem that firms select fixed price callable debt to mitigate bondholder-shareholder conflicts.

We study the performance and behavior of Value at Risk measures used by a number of large U.S. banks before, during and after the financial crisis. Alternative benchmark VaR measures, including GARCH-based measures, are estimated directly from the banks’ trading revenues to explain the bank VaR performance results. While overly conservative in both the pre-crisis and post-crisis periods, bank VaR exceedances were excessive and clustered in the crisis period. This contrasted with mostly unbiased benchmark HS and GARCH VaRs in the pre-crisis and post-crisis periods, and vastly superior GARCH-based VaR performance in the crisis period with lower exceedance rates and no exceedance clustering. Our results document the bank VaRs very slow adjustment to changing market conditions and their systematic bias in all studied periods. Our results indicate that bank VaRs could be improved by the use of models with time-varying volatility, and built on banks’ knowledge of their current positions.