This paper provides first evidence of negative peer disclosure (NPD), an emerging corporate strategy to publicize adverse news of industry peers on social media. Consistent with NPDs being implicit positive self-disclosures, disclosing firms experience a two-day abnormal return of 1.6–1.7% over the market and industry. Further exploring the benefits and costs of such disclosures, we find that NPD propensity increases with the degree of product market rivalry and technology proximity and disclosing firms outperform nondisclosing peers in the product markets in the year following NPDs. These results rationalize peer disclosure and extend the scope of the literature beyond self-disclosure.

We use common factor analysis on seven individual management quality measures to extract a management quality factor and examine its relationship with corporate social performance. Using managers’ draft risk during the Vietnam War as an instrumental variable for management quality, we find that firms with higher-quality managers score better in Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR). The cross-sectional results suggest that high-quality managers strategically invest in CSR when potential benefits outweigh the costs. Specifically, the positive relationship between management quality and CSR is more pronounced for firms under fierce product market competition when CSR is crucial for differentiating the firm from its competitors. Moreover, CSR becomes more sensitive to management quality when customer awareness and investor attention are high, increasing the likelihood that CSR enhances customer perception and investor trust. Finally, we find that CSR investment by high-quality managers creates more shareholder value, suggesting that higher-quality managers are more capable of “doing well by doing good.”

International standards encourage auditors to consider regulatory factors and external parties during the risk assessment process. One such external party is the taxation authority, which monitors corporate conduct and uses the threat of tax audits to constrain managerial opportunism. This study examines whether tax enforcement influences auditors' perception of the risk of material misstatement on their engagements. Using a sample of companies listed on European exchanges, we assess the strength of tax enforcement at the country level based on the number of full‐time equivalent (FTE) employees in the tax audit and verification function relative to the size of the economy. Since auditors of these European listed companies must publicly disclose key audit matters (KAMs), we use the number of KAMs to capture auditors' perceptions of client‐level misstatement risk. Our results indicate that auditors report fewer KAMs in the presence of more FTEs in the tax audit and verification function. In cross‐sectional tests, we find that this negative association is stronger in settings where auditors are more inclined to incorporate the monitoring potential of the tax authority into their risk assessment, such as in countries with high book‐tax conformity and for auditors with greater exposure to complex tax issues. These findings offer new insights into the role of tax enforcement in auditors' decision‐making and have timely implications for accounting regulators and academics studying the determinants of KAMs.