I investigate reliability differences across recognition and disclosure regimes to shed light on differing incentives and reporting of employee stock option (ESO) fair values. I compare ESO fair values based on firm-reported inputs with ESO fair values based on benchmark inputs, estimated following authoritative guidance. On average, I find opportunism increases with recognition as compared with disclosure, and that it is associated with incentives to manage earnings. Despite the increase in opportunism, I find that accuracy does not decline for recognizers, and that accuracy differs across voluntary and mandatory recognition.

As audits of public companies are labor intensive, require a variety of team members, and involve year-round work, practitioners and academics have increasingly focused on identifying audit production factors that drive audit quality. Using proprietary data, we analyze the cost-benefit tradeoffs of two audit production characteristics, client expertise and the relative amount of auditing done during the early phases of the audit, and find that both are associated with more effective audits and higher fees. We analyze whether the influence of these characteristics varies across audit team members. We find that middle manager production characteristics explain audit effectiveness and higher fees and relatively more so than those of lead/review partners. These results extend the literature and practitioner discussions about drivers of audit quality by highlighting the importance of middle management, which, to our knowledge, has largely been overlooked by the archival audit literature and regulatory guidance on audit quality indicators. Data Availability: This paper exploits proprietary PCAOB data. Data descriptions are available in the text.

We provide large‐sample archival evidence on the nature and consequences of errors deemed immaterial to the previously issued financial statements containing the errors (immaterial errors). The incidence of immaterial error corrections has been increasing since about 2004, and these corrections are associated with modestly and discernibly negative share returns that are more negative for income‐decreasing corrections and corrections that involve multiple issues. We find that immaterial errors are a leading indicator of poor reporting reliability as measured by future material and immaterial reporting errors, material weaknesses in internal controls, and SEC comment letters. Our findings suggest that immaterial errors provide researchers and investors with a more frequent and less severe indicator of potential audit or financial reporting issues as compared to more extreme reporting problems such as material errors corrected by restatements.

We analyze the disposition of auditor‐proposed adjustments to financial statements. Our analyses address concerns, expressed by regulators and others, that auditors and their clients fixate on quantitative thresholds and overlook qualitative factors in assessing the materiality of discovered misstatements. Using a large sample of Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (PCAOB)‐inspected audits, we examine the frequency with which management records versus waives auditor‐proposed adjustments and whether waiving‐proposed adjustments ha consequences for reporting reliability and the audit process. We find waived adjustments are linked to lower financial reporting quality measured by material misstatements, to incentives to meet/beat earnings targets, and to the audit process, as measured by higher next‐period audit effort and fees and higher next‐period proposed adjustments. These effects on the audit process are consistent with auditors responding to the increased risk associated with waived adjustments. In an exploratory analysis, we find that controlling for the amount of proposed adjustments, auditor resignations are negatively associated with waived adjustments.

We analyze data made available through the PCAOB (Public Company Accounting Oversight Board) to provide descriptive evidence on the properties of auditors’ actual quantitative materiality judgments and the implications of those judgments for financial reporting. Auditors’ quantitative materiality judgments do not appear to result simply from applying conventional rules of thumb (e.g., 5% of pretax income), but instead are associated with size‐related financial statement outcomes (income, revenues, and assets), where the relative importance of the size‐related outcomes varies with client characteristics such as financial performance. Using the distribution of actual materiality amounts reported by auditors to the PCAOB as part of the audit‐inspection process, we construct a materiality‐judgment measure that locates a specific materiality amount within a normal range that is both comparable across varying client characteristics and supported by guidance in audit firm internal policy manuals. We find that looser materiality (an amount closer to the high end of a normal materiality range) is associated with fewer audit hours and lower audit fees, supporting the construct validity of this measure. We also find that looser materiality is associated with lower amounts of proposed audit adjustments and, in extreme cases, with a greater incidence of restatements, highlighting the importance of auditor materiality assessments for financial reporting reliability.

In December 2004, the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) mandated the use of a fair value–based measurement attribute to value employee stock options (ESOs) via Financial Accounting Standard (FAS) 123‐R. In anticipation of FAS 123‐R, between March 2004 and November 2005, several firms accelerate the vesting of ESOs to avoid recognizing existing unvested ESO grants at fair value in future financial statements. We find that the likelihood of accelerated vesting is higher if (1) acceleration has a greater effect on future ESO compensation expense, especially related to underwater options, and (2) firms suffer greater agency problems, proxied by fewer blockholders, lower pension fund ownership, and top five officers holding a greater share of ESOs. We also find a negative stock price reaction around the announcement of the acceleration decision. Furthermore, stock returns are significantly negative before the new vesting dates and positive afterward, suggesting that vesting dates could have been backdated.

We provide evidence that disclosed items are not processed differently from recognized items when the disclosures are salient, not based on management estimates, and amenable to simple techniques for imputing as-if recognized amounts. For a sample of firms with both capital and operating leases, we find that as-if recognized amounts for leases are generally reliable and that both recognized lease obligations and disclosed lease obligations are associated with proxies for costs of debt and equity. The magnitudes of these associations are not statistically different across accounting treatments, suggesting that market participants impound as-if recognized operating lease obligations and recognized capital lease obligations similarly into costs of capital. Conditioning on the reliability of as-if recognized operating lease obligations, we find a difference in the association between recognized versus as-if recognized lease obligations and proxies for the costs of debt and equity when the operating lease disclosures are less reliable. Data Availability: Data used are available from public sources identified in the study.

We examine whether securities lawyers involved in SEC comment letter inquiries act as client advocates by resisting disclosure changes or as gatekeepers by encouraging disclosure transparency. Consistent with an advocacy role, we find that securities lawyers' involvement in SEC comment letters is associated with resisting disclosure inquiries through redacting information from filings and issuing fewer amendments to previous disclosures. Our evidence also supports the view that the role of securities lawyers extends beyond the specific inquiry; their involvement is associated with improved readability and more cautionary language in the subsequent 10-K, and fewer future restatements and comment letters. Last, we find that securities lawyers serve more of an advocacy role when proprietary costs are high and when the inquiry involves a possible amendment, but more of a gatekeeper role when an inquiry is more complex.