Recent research suggesting that shareholders demand conservative financial reporting raises the question: Which shareholders demand conservatism? We find that higher ownership by institutions that are likely to monitor managers is associated with more conservative financial reporting. This positive association is more pronounced among firms with more growth options and higher information asymmetry, where direct monitoring is more difficult and the potential governance benefits of conservatism are greater. Further, lead-lag tests of the direction of causality suggest that ownership by monitoring institutions leads to more conservative reporting, rather than the reverse. Collectively, these results are consistent with monitoring institutions demanding conservatism.

We examine the impact of institutional ownership on financial reporting discretion, focusing on whether the impact varies with institutions' cost of acquiring monitoring information. Using geographic distance between the firm and the institutional investor as a proxy for the cost of acquiring monitoring information, we find that corporate managers are less likely to use financial reporting discretion in the presence of local monitoring institutions than distant monitoring institutions. We also find that the impact of monitoring institutions on financial reporting discretion varies with the costs and benefits of financial reporting discretion.

We provide evidence that transient institutional investors (i.e., those actively trading to maximize short term profits) trade to exploit the post-earnings announcement drift (PEAD). We estimate that transient institutions’ arbitrage generates an abnormal return of 5.1% (or 22% annualized) after transaction costs. In addition, their arbitrage trades accelerate the speed that stock prices reflect the implications of current earnings for future earnings. However, transient institutions trade less aggressively to exploit PEAD in firms with high transaction costs. Our results contribute to understanding the role of transient institutional investors in explaining the persistence of PEAD.

This study examines the relation between earnings management and block ownership of same‐industry peer firms by a common set of institutional investors (common institutional ownership). This relation is important given the tremendous growth of common institutional ownership and the significant influence of blockholders on financial reporting. We hypothesize that common institutional ownership mitigates earnings management by enhancing institutions' monitoring efficiency and by encouraging institutions to internalize the negative externality of a firm's earnings management on peer firms' investments. Consistent with our hypothesis, we find that higher common institutional ownership is related to less earnings management. Analyses of a quasi‐natural experiment based on financial institution mergers show that this negative relation is unlikely to be driven by the endogeneity of common institutional ownership. Cross‐sectional tests provide evidence that the negative relation is stronger among firms for which common institutional ownership is likely to generate a greater reduction in institutions' information acquisition and processing costs, and among firms whose severe financial misstatements are more likely to distort co‐owned peer firms' investments, supporting both mechanisms underlying our hypothesis. Our findings inform the ongoing debate on the costs and benefits of common institutional ownership by highlighting an important benefit: the enhanced monitoring of financial reporting.

Miller and Modigliani's (1961) dividend irrelevance theorem predicts that in perfect capital markets dividend policy should not affect investment decisions. Yet in imperfect markets, external funding constraints that stem from information asymmetry can force firms to forgo valuable investment projects in order to pay dividends. We find that high-quality financial reporting significantly mitigates the negative effect of dividends on investments, especially on R&D investments. Further, this mitigating role of financial reporting quality is particularly important among firms with a larger portion of firm value attributable to growth options. In addition, we show that the mitigating role of high-quality financial reporting is more pronounced among firms that have decreased dividends than among firms that have increased dividends. These results highlight the important role of financial reporting quality in mitigating the conflict between firms' investment and dividend decisions and thereby reducing the likelihood that firms forgo valuable investment projects in order to pay dividends. Data Availability: Data are available from public sources identified in the paper.