Based on prospect theory's value function, we predict how reference points adapt to influence individuals' tax evasion choices during and after experiencing temporary tax changes. Results from a multi-round experiment indicate reactions to temporary changes depend jointly on the direction of the change and expectations. Specifically, individuals experiencing a tax increase evade more while the increase is in effect. More interestingly, knowing, versus not knowing, a tax decrease is temporary prevents an increase in evasion after the temporary change expires, and may lead individuals to reduce evasion during the change. In a supplemental condition, we induce uncertainty by repeatedly extending a tax decrease. We find when uncertainty is introduced, both benefits of knowing the temporal nature of the decrease are lost. Overall results are consistent with individuals failing to adapt to a loss state and adapting quickly to a gain state unless they are certain the gain state is temporary.

This study investigates whether the benefit firms can extract from team member communication to the team manager—who may use such information for rewarding individual team members—is affected by differences in the type of mutual monitoring information available to team members. We predict and find that team performance is higher when team members can observe only each other's effort than when they can observe both each other's effort and output levels; conversely, team performance is lower when team members can observe only each other's output than when they can observe both each other's effort and output levels. The intuition behind these results is that the type of observable mutual monitoring information creates different degrees of ambiguity regarding what should be considered a fair reward allocation for team members' contributions. Such ambiguity reduces the usefulness of team member communication to the manager for allocating rewards, resulting in lower team performance. Data Availability: Data are available from the authors upon request.

Older wealth holders spend down assets much more slowly than predicted by classic life-cycle models. This paper introduces health-dependent utility into a model with incomplete markets in which preferences for bequests, expenditures when in need of long-term care, and ordinary consumption combine with health and longevity uncertainty to explain saving behavior. To sharply identify motives, it develops strategic survey questions (SSQs) that elicit stated preferences. The model is estimated using these SSQs and wealth data from the Vanguard Research Initiative. The desire to self-insure against long-term-care risk explains a substantial fraction of the wealth holding of many older Americans.

We investigate the effect of cross-border regulatory cooperation in the enforcement of securities laws on global-mutual-fund portfolio allocations. Our research design exploits a shock to the Securities and Exchange Commission’s oversight of foreign firms cross-listed on a US stock exchange around the signing of the Multilateral Memorandum of Understanding (MMoU), a non-binding, information-sharing arrangement between global securities regulators. In signatory countries, foreign investment in US-cross-listed firms increases by $110 billion relative to non-cross-listed firms. The strongest effects are for investors facing greater information asymmetries, those from countries closely linked to the US, and non-US foreign investors, suggesting significant spillover effects from international regulatory cooperation.

This paper studies how welfare outcomes in centralized school choice depend on the assignment mechanism when participants are not fully informed. Using a survey of school choice participants in a strategic setting, we show that beliefs about admissions chances differ from rational expectations values and predict choice behavior. To quantify the welfare costs of belief errors, we estimate a model of school choice that incorporates subjective beliefs. We evaluate the equilibrium effects of switching to a strategy-proof deferred acceptance algorithm, and of improving households’ belief accuracy. We find that a switch to truthful reporting in the DA mechanism offers welfare improvements over the baseline given the belief errors we observe in the data, but that an analyst who assumed families had accurate beliefs would have reached the opposite conclusion.

We use Finnish OMX Helsinki data to examine the relationship between demographic variables, individual investors' broker choices and trade informativeness. We find that men prefer to use Full-Service-Retail over Discount-Retail brokers and that a higher level of income leads to a higher likelihood of using Discount-Retail brokers. Women present more heterogenous broker choice behaviors. However, both genders are more likely to carry out larger trades through Discount-Retail brokers. We show that trades executed via Discount-Retail brokers are more informative than those of Full-Service-Retail brokers and that only Discount-Retail brokers show trade informativeness differences across gender after controlling for age. Collectively, women make more informative trades then men, but this result reverses after partitioning by age. We conclude that conditioning on the type of broker reduces unobserved individual investor heterogeneity and that demographic variables are essential to the understanding of broker clientele effect. Furthermore, clientele differences observed across broker types are market specific and dominate the effects of financial advice in determining trade informativeness.

Prior research indicates that most audit legal disputes settle. There is, however, little evidence of the factors that drive the settlement norm and its exceptions in audit legal disputes. To better understand these factors, we rely on theory related to how professionals manage risks and, as a result, how professions defend jurisdictional claims. We use this theoretical lens to help motivate four research questions that we probe by interviewing 27 prominent attorneys experienced in audit litigation. Consistent with our lens, our interview data indicate that attorneys manage their risks, including the risk of reputational loss, by settling based on their expectations of trial verdicts. Unlike trials, settlements simultaneously enable attorneys on both sides to limit costs and avoid catastrophic jury verdicts and, by doing so, claim “wins” for their clients. Attorneys also stress that they settle many audit disputes without any legal filings. Thus, a large subset of disputes is invisible to the public and researchers. Attorneys characterize trials as exceptions to the settlement norm that emerge due to abnormal conditions sometimes present in disputes. However, trial verdicts in these abnormal conditions help attorneys justify the use of settlements to clients, as attorneys stress that by settling they can avoid the dreaded possibility of extreme unfavorable verdicts. We conclude that as individual attorneys manage their risks, especially the risk of reputational loss, their profession maintains its public image and thereby defends its jurisdictional claims. Among the many questions we pose for future research is whether the settlement norm reduces society's ability to monitor the audit profession and, more generally, whether this norm's benefits outweigh its drawbacks.

We develop metrics to assess the complexity of a bank holding company (BHC), based on its ownership structure. Large BHCs have intricate ownership hierarchies involving hundreds or even thousands of legal entities that may contribute to increased operational risk and greater opacity. Our measures are mathematically grounded, intuitive, and easy to implement. They may be particularly useful in the context of resolution, where regulators often face significant time pressure and coordination challenges. We use regulatory filing data from the Federal Reserve to validate the measures, demonstrating that they provide a useful complement to balance sheet information in assessing BHC complexity. Notably, the proposed measures are highly correlated with existing complexity indicators that are not based on organizational structure and are less correlated with size than these existing complexity measures. We show that the proposed measures provide additional explanatory power for the regulatory indicators, even after controlling for size.

We provide new evidence on the codependence among the many country attributes previously linked to financial reporting quality. First, we show that the synchronicity of 21 changing country attributes spikes surrounding mandatory IFRS adoption. Thus, while IFRS adoption “explains” increased reporting quality, this finding disappears after including other changing country determinants of reporting quality. Second, a single underlying factor distills the numerous reporting quality measures used in the international literature. Finally, we document that four underlying country factors largely subsume the individual explanatory power of 72 candidate country attributes in explaining reporting quality levels across countries. We conclude with implications and suggestions for future research on international reporting quality. JEL Classifications: F30; G15; K22; M41. Data Availability: Data used in this paper are from publicly available sources and/or are drawn directly from data tabulated in published research papers.

In this paper, we use accounting fundamentals to measure systematic risk of distress. Our main testable prediction—that this risk increases with the probability of recessionary failure, P(R|F)—is based on a stylized model that guides our empirical analyses. We first apply the lasso method to select accounting fundamentals that can be combined into P(R|F) estimates. We then use the obtained estimates in asset-pricing tests. This approach successfully extracts systematic risk information from accounting data—we document a significant positive premium associated with P(R|F) estimates. The premium covaries with the news about the business cycle and aggregate failure rates. Additional tests underscore the importance of the “structure” imposed through recessionary-failure-probability estimation. The “agnostic” return predictor that relies only on past correlations between the same fundamental variables and returns exhibits markedly different properties.