Firms are facing increasing pressure to provide information about their Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) commitment. Firms however differ in the quality of how they communicate CSR-related efforts to stakeholders as well as in the intensity of their CSR contracting. We examine the relationship between CSR disclosures and contracting and argue that the designs of the two practices are complements in signaling a CSR commitment. Using hand-collected data to capture disclosure quality of CSR reports and intensity of CSR contracting (i.e., scope, importance, and degree to which CSR metrics are incorporated) for S&P 500 firms, we show that firms indeed align the design choices of the two practices. In addition, firms using both practices intensively are associated with a stronger CSR commitment and more credible CSR disclosures. Finally, we document that firms that face higher credibility concerns show stronger complementarity between the design of these two practices. Data Availability: All data are available from public sources mentioned in the text.

Amendment of IAS 39 by the IASB in 2008 provided an option to reclassify investments from fair value to historical cost. We predict that too-important-to-fail (TITF) banks took less advantage of this option because the political protection they enjoyed insulated them from regulatory pressure. Banks that did not enjoy this protection had greater reason to make use of this option since doing so would protect their Tier 1 capital. As predicted, findings reveal that TITF banks made less use of the reclassification option to protect their Tier 1 capital and there is a significant moderating influence of TITF status on the incentive to reclassify investments for banks with lower regulatory capital. This finding is consistent with TITF banks placing less weight on protecting regulatory capital and thereby retaining flexibility to sell assets. Our findings provide evidence that accounting choices are affected by the importance of banks to their economies.

Exploiting detailed disclosures mandated by Accounting Standard Codification (ASC) 820, we provide evidence for the return relevance of Level 3 fair value remeasurements for a comprehensive sample of U.S. listed banks. We find that Level 3 remeasurements recognized in earnings are more return relevant than those recognized in other comprehensive income (OCI). Our results suggest that Level 3 remeasurements in OCI partially reflect transitory illiquidity discounts that are less relevant when banks have the ability to hold the underlying assets. The regulatory capital treatment of OCI also affects the return relevance of Level 3 remeasurements in OCI. Importantly, we find no differences in the return relevance of realized versus unrealized Level 3 remeasurements in earnings, allaying concerns that investors perceive unrealized Level 3 remeasurements of lesser quality. Overall, our findings support the usefulness of the segregated disclosures of Level 3 fair value remeasurements. Data Availability: Data are available from the public sources cited in the text.

This study investigates the influence of managerial incentives to meet or beat the zero earnings benchmark on labor cost behavior of private Belgian firms. We posit that relative to managers of firms reporting healthy profits, managers meeting or beating the zero earnings benchmark will increase labor costs to a smaller extent when activity increases and decrease labor costs to a larger extent when activity decreases. This should take the form of more symmetric labor cost behavior for firms that report a small profit. Our findings are consistent with this prediction. Using detailed employee data, we show that managers of firms reporting a small profit focus on firing employees who are relatively low cost to fire. To protect their reputation in the labor market, managers of other firms, particularly those reporting healthy profits, limit the numbers of dismissals and react to activity changes by changing the number of hours that employees work. Data Availability: Data are available from the sources referred to in the text.

This study examines whether the implementation of industry-specific accounting standards helps capital market participants in making decisions about providing capital to firms. We predict and find an, on average, increase in firms’ capital growth in years following implementation of the relevant industry standard. The increase in capital growth arises primarily from equity issuances and is attributable to the implementation of the standards rather than industry-specific trends or economic shocks. We explore heterogeneity in industry standards and find more pronounced effects for (i) industry standards that reveal new information, provide explicit guidance, or increase accounting uniformity, and (ii) small firms, firms with greater information asymmetry, and firms with greater capital constraints before implementation of the standards. We also find evidence consistent with two channels explaining the documented increase in capital flows: reduction of information asymmetry and increase in financial statement comparability.