American Economic Review200191(5), 1621-1630open access
Inflation Is Always and Everywhere a Monetary Phenomenon: Richmond vs. Houston in 1864 by Richard C. K. Burdekin and Marc D. Weidenmier. Published in volume 91, issue 5, pages 1621-1630 of American Economic Review, December 2001
Journal of Accounting Research202159(1), 243-281open access
Implied equity duration was originally developed to analyze the sensitivity of equity prices to discount rate changes. We demonstrate that implied equity duration is also useful for analyzing the sensitivity of equity prices to pandemic shutdowns. Pandemic shutdowns primarily impact short‐term cash flows, thus they have a greater impact on low‐duration equities. We show that implied equity duration has a strong positive relation to U.S. equity returns and analyst forecast revisions during the onset of the 2020 COVID‐19 shutdown. Our analysis also demonstrates that the underperformance of “value” stocks during this period is a rational response to their lower durations.
Prior research documents that providing relative performance information (RPI) motivates employees to increase effort; however, a potential downside of RPI is that it also motivates employees to distort their effort allocations between tasks such that it can be detrimental to overall firm performance. This study investigates via an experiment how the informativeness of RPI affects employees' effort allocations and performance in a multitask environment. We investigate the informativeness of two RPI design choices that are observed in practice: detail level and temporal aggregation. Regarding detail level, firms may provide each employee's performance ranking on tasks, which is less informative than providing the actual performance score of each employee. Regarding temporal aggregation, firms may provide RPI that is reset each period, which is less informative than RPI that is based on cumulative performance. We find RPI detail level and temporal aggregation interact to influence effort distortion. Specifically, we find that, compared to reset RPI, cumulative RPI leads to greater distortion of effort away from firm‐preferred allocations and that this effect is magnified when RPI provides actual performance scores rather than performance rankings. Finally, high levels of effort distortion hurt overall performance, thereby demonstrating the potentially detrimental effect of effort distortion on performance. Results of our study enhance our understanding of how firms can use their control over the design of RPI to enhance its usefulness in directing employees' effort in multitask environments by highlighting the role that informativeness of information can have on employee behavior.
We examine the effect of foreign employment on two outcomes—income shifting and the tax uncertainty of foreign transactions. Using a hand-collected sample of employment disclosures, we partition our sample into firm-years with a higher or lower degree of foreign employment. Using two distinct income shifting models, we document that, on average, a high degree of foreign employment is associated with greater tax-motivated income shifting out of the U.S. We also posit and find that a high degree of foreign employment enhances the economic substance of foreign transactions, reducing the tax uncertainty associated with foreign income. We conduct additional analyses to mitigate selection bias concerns, and we use exogenous changes to the costs and benefits of income shifting using foreign employment to strengthen identification. Our results highlight firms' use of employees as part of a tax-efficient supply chain and how foreign employment enhances income shifting opportunities between jurisdictions.
During a look-back analysis, auditors review prior-period evidence to understand estimation inaccuracies and assess the reliability of management's estimation process. We find that evidence specificity moderates the relation between the consistency of an estimation inaccuracy with management's incentives and auditors' reliability assessments. The direction of an estimation inaccuracy has no effect on auditors' reliability assessments when the prior-period evidence is less specific. When prior-period evidence is more specific, auditors report the highest (lowest) reliability assessments of management's estimation process when an estimation inaccuracy is inconsistent (consistent) with management's incentives. Auditors' low reliability assessments in the more specific, consistent condition, however, do not translate to high risk assessments. Instead, specificity has a main effect on auditors' risk assessments. A follow-up experiment reveals, though, an inverse relation between auditors' reliability and risk assessments when auditors are provided procedures to address various levels of assessed misstatement risk.
This paper examines whether investor relations (IR) officers provide value by facilitating the assimilation of firm information by the market. We find that firms with IR officers have lower stock price volatility, lower analyst forecast dispersion, higher analyst forecast accuracy, and quicker price discovery, consistent with IR officers aiding market participants in their assimilation of firm information. We also show that our findings are stronger for firms with longer-tenured IR officers. Finally, we find that when firms transition from a long-tenured IR officer to a new IR officer, stock price volatility increases, analyst forecasts become more disperse and less accurate, and the price discovery process slows, despite no significant change in the firm's disclosures, media coverage, or performance around the turnover. Collectively, these findings suggest that in-house IR officers, particularly those with greater experience, help facilitate information assimilation by the market, which has positive market effects.
Firm disclosures often reach only a portion of investors, which results in information asymmetry among investors and, therefore, lower market liquidity. This issue is particularly salient for firms that are not highly visible, as they tend not to receive broad news dissemination via traditional intermediaries, such as the press. This paper examines whether firms can reduce information asymmetry by more broadly disseminating their news. To isolate the impact of dissemination, we focus our analysis on firms' use of Twitter and exploit the 140-character message restriction. Specifically, using a sample of technology firms, we examine the impact of using Twitter to send market participants links to press releases that are provided via traditional disclosure methods. We find this additional dissemination of firm-initiated news via Twitter is associated with lower abnormal bid-ask spreads and greater abnormal depths, consistent with a reduction in information asymmetry. Moreover, this result holds mainly for firms that are not highly visible, consistent with them being in greater need of this additional dissemination channel. We also examine the impact of dissemination on a volume-based measure of liquidity, and find that dissemination is positively associated with liquidity. Data Availability: All data are publicly available from the sources indicated in the paper.