We study how public firm misvaluation affects private peer firm investments. An economic competition hypothesis predicts a negative relation because misvaluation-induced new investment by public firms crowds out investment by private peers that share common input or output markets. An alternative shared sentiment hypothesis predicts a positive relation because private firm stakeholders share in the sentiment associated with misvaluation in public markets. Misvaluation is proxied using both the price-to-fundamental ratio and an exogenous instrument obtained from mutual fund flows. The evidence is consistent with the shared sentiment hypothesis, and robust to alternative treatments for growth opportunities. Private firms finance misvaluation-induced investment primarily internally or externally with debt, not equity. Finally, misvaluation-induced investment increases future return on investment for private firms, in contrast with public firms. Overall, these findings suggest that overvaluation in public markets increases private firm investments and has beneficial effects on private firm investments by relaxing financing constraints. JEL Classifications: G32; M41. Data Availability: Data are available from sources identified in the paper.

We investigate whether PCAOB-identified audit deficiencies lead to higher audit fees or turnover likelihood for clients of Big 4 auditors. To examine this, we identify areas of GAAP related to PCAOB deficiencies for each auditor. We then use textual analysis to identify how important the deficiencies are to clients to measure each client's exposure to deficient auditing. We find that this measure positively relates to audit fees and that this association is moderated by client bargaining power. Auditor turnover is also higher when deficiency exposure is high relative to what it would be for peer auditors, but we only observe this relation for smaller clients and do not find it is affected by client bargaining power. Finally, we find that companies switching Big 4 auditors tend to select an auditor resulting in lower deficiency exposure. These results have implications for understanding how PCAOB inspection reports affect the market for audit services. JEL Classifications: M41; M42. Data Availability: We obtain all data from publicly available sources.

Auditing standards recommend separate assessments of the likelihood and magnitude of risks (hereafter, LM decomposition). Prior research shows that decomposition can focus individuals on the components of a judgment and make them more sensitive to information. An experiment with 101 experienced auditors shows that LM decomposition leads auditors to be less concerned about high-risk fraud schemes relative to auditors who make holistic risk assessments. Our analyses also show that, relative to those making holistic risk assessments, the correlation between auditors' likelihood judgments and their overall fraud risk judgments and the coherence of their fraud risk judgments are higher for auditors who perform an LM decomposition. Two follow-up experiments with students replicate these findings for higher-risk events, and (unlike the auditor experiment) we also find that LM decomposition results in lower risk judgments for lower-risk issues. We also find that LM decomposition mitigates the influence of affective responses on high-risk judgments.

In this paper, we examine how CEO succession and succession planning affect perceptions of financial reporting risk among stakeholders who are responsible for and oversee firms' financial reporting (e.g., auditors, management, and audit committees). Management succession introduces uncertainty about firms' future operations, financial policies, and potential motivation for earnings management, which we predict elevates the perceived risk of financial reporting improprieties. Consistent with this prediction, we find that audit fees are higher for firms with new CEOs. Importantly, however, we note that careful CEO succession planning (i.e., promoting an “heir apparent”) attenuates perceptions of higher risk, as evidenced by a lack of an audit pricing adjustment. These results are robust to several alternative specifications and analyses designed to mitigate the concern that the association between audit fees and CEO succession and succession planning is driven by factors leading to the CEO change. We also show that audit fee increases dissipate over time as the new, non-heir CEO stays longer at the firm, reinforcing the inference that audit fees increase in response to the uncertainty surrounding a new CEO. Additionally, we do not find evidence of a deterioration in audit quality with new CEOs, independent of the succession plan.

We classify all institutional investors that file Form 13-F over the period 1995–2013 as either “tax-sensitive” or “tax-insensitive” based on their trading behavior and portfolio characteristics. We examine tests of the effects of investor tax-sensitivity on portfolio rebalancing, price pressure, and fund performance, and compare our measure of tax-sensitive institutional investor ownership to three measures used in prior studies. We show that our measure of tax-sensitive investors dominates other measures in the portfolio rebalancing and price pressure tests. In the fund performance test, our measure of tax-sensitivity is the only one that finds that tax-sensitive investors have significantly lower returns on their portfolio stocks, which is a new result in the literature.

This study examines the effects that two balanced scorecard framework (BSF) elements, causal linkages between strategic objectives (“causal linkages”) and time delay information (“delays”) in a strategy map, have on long-term profit performance in a dynamic decision-making environment. Using a computer-based simulation task, we conduct a 3 × (4) experiment (control group; causal linkages without delays; causal linkages with delays; four simulation rounds) and find that managers presented with causal linkages without delays generate greater long-term profit compared to a control group. For managers presented with causal linkages with delays, long-term profit generation is higher than the control group, but is not significantly different from the causal linkages without delays treatment. Those managers presented with causal linkages with delays, however, demonstrate learning across the four simulation rounds. In contrast, learning is found to plateau for the causal linkages without delays treatment and is not present for the control group. We also examine the cognitive mechanism through which these two BSF elements impact performance, by measuring the accuracy of two components of managers' mental models. Data Availability: Experimental materials are available upon request from the authors.

In this study, we examine the benefits of membership in an accounting firm association, network, or alliance (collectively referred to as “an association”). Associations provide member accounting firms with numerous benefits, including access to the expertise of professionals from other independent member firms, joint conferences and technical trainings, assistance in dealing with staffing and geographic limitations, and the ability to use the association name in marketing materials. We expect these benefits to result in higher-quality audits and higher audit fees (or audit fee premiums). Using hand-collected data on association membership, we find that association member firms conduct higher-quality audits than nonmember firms, where audit quality is proxied for by fewer Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (PCAOB) inspection deficiencies and fewer financial statement misstatements, as well as less extreme absolute discretionary accruals and lower positive discretionary accruals. We also find that audit fees are higher for clients of member firms than for clients of nonmember firms, suggesting that clients are willing to pay an audit fee premium to engage association member audit firms. Finally, we find that member firm audits are of similar quality to a size-matched sample of Big 4 audits, but member firm clients pay lower fee premiums than do Big 4 clients. Our inferences are robust to the use of company size-matched control samples, audit firm size-matched control samples, propensity score matching, two-stage least squares regression, and to analyses that consider changes in association membership. Our findings should be of interest to regulators because they suggest that association membership assists small audit firms in overcoming barriers to auditing larger audit clients. In addition, our findings should be informative to audit committees when making auditor selection decisions, and to investors and accounting researchers interested in the relation between audit firm type and audit quality.

This paper reports five studies examining audit team members' willingness to raise audit issues. The first study is a survey of interacting audit teams that provides evidence that team members are more willing to speak up when they view their leader as team-oriented (i.e., emphasizing team success as opposed to the leader's own personal advancement). Experiments 1–3 provide converging evidence that audit seniors are more willing to speak up to a team-oriented leader and about issues that are aligned with that leader's concerns. Experiment 4 provides evidence that the effect of team-oriented leadership on willingness to speak up is mediated by team members' commitment to the team leader and, to a lesser extent, by their identification with their team, but not by concerns about the immediate or eventual repercussions of speaking up. Together, these studies provide evidence that auditors' willingness to raise audit issues is affected by what the auditor has to say and how they think their message will be received, potentially affecting audit effectiveness and audit efficiency. Data Availability: Contact the authors.

When the fair value of an investment security falls below amortized cost and there is significant doubt that the firm can hold the security until the fair value recovers, an other-than-temporary impairment (OTTI) is recognized in net income. Thus, an OTTI is a disclosure about the prospect of recovering an unrealized loss. Our findings suggest that investors priced banks' OTTI recognition during and after the financial crisis. Investors were unable to fully anticipate reported OTTIs, and priced OTTIs incrementally to reported unrealized gains/losses. After banks were required to bifurcate OTTIs, investors priced only the portion of OTTI recognized in earnings. Our results suggest that reporting unrealized losses in earnings via an OTTI changes how investors price the losses. The results inform recent standard-setting initiatives to expand disclosure about changes in fair value. JEL Classifications: M41; M42; M44. Data Availability: Data are available from sources identified in the paper.

Critics argue that fair value provisions in U.S. accounting rules exacerbated the recent financial crisis by depleting banks' regulatory capital, which curtailed lending and triggered asset sales, leading to further economic turmoil. Defenders counter-argue that the fair value provisions were insufficient to lead to the pro-cyclical effects alleged by the critics. Our evidence indicates that these provisions did not affect the commercial banking industry in the ways commonly alleged by critics. First, we show that fair value accounting losses had minimal effect on regulatory capital. Then, we examine sales of securities during the crisis, finding mixed evidence that banks sold securities in response to capital-depleting charges. However, the sales that potentially resulted from the charges appear to be economically insignificant, as there was no industry- or firm-level increase in sales of securities during the crisis. JEL Classifications: M41; M42; M44. Data Availability: Data are available from sources identified in the article.