Contemporary Accounting Research最新文献

Regulators and practitioners have concerns that the lack of standardization in non-GAAP disclosure can make it challenging for users to process non-GAAP earnings and use it in decision-making. We examine whether auditor style extends beyond mandatory disclosures to induce similarity in non-GAAP earnings disclosures. Specifically, we find that clients audited by the same auditor are more likely to disclose non-GAAP earnings in a similar manner. We assess disclosure similarity using (1) the decision to disclose non-GAAP earnings, (2) the disclosure prominence of non-GAAP earnings in the earnings press release, (3) the discussion of non-GAAP earnings in the management discussion and analysis of the annual report, (4) the choice to exclude recurring items, and (5) the receipt of SEC comment letters related to non-GAAP earnings. We find that the association between auditor style and non-GAAP disclosure is determined by Big 4 accounting firms and clients audited by the same audit office. The results are stronger for larger audit offices and smaller clients. We provide evidence that auditors facilitate non-GAAP disclosure, which can improve compliance with SEC requirements and increase the standardization of non-GAAP earnings disclosures. Our results are relevant to current policy discussions regarding auditor involvement in unaudited non-GAAP earnings reporting.

In this paper, we investigate whether federal judge ideology, ceteris paribus, affects auditor litigation risk and auditor behavior. We find that auditors whose client firms are in jurisdictions dominated by liberal judges are more likely to be sued and make higher payouts to plaintiffs when sued. Furthermore, these client firms are more likely to receive going-concern opinions and pay higher audit fees. Finally, we find no evidence that the quality of audited financial statements is affected by judge ideology. The evidence documented in this paper indicates that federal judge ideology affects auditor litigation risk and some aspects of auditor behavior.

We investigate the impact of firm-level political risk on loan contracting. We find that firm-level political risk is positively associated with bank loan cost and that this effect is stronger for firms experiencing increased operational uncertainty and higher default risks. Firm-level political risk also leads to more unfavorable non-pricing loan terms. To alleviate endogeneity concerns, we use an instrumental variable approach and placebo tests. We further find that political connections and relationship-based borrowing can attenuate the adverse effect of firm-level political risk on loan contracting.

Building effective corporate culture is challenging as it requires senior managers to embed shared values within the firm. Yet some firms can do so, and some cannot. This study examines whether managers' career preferences influence manager-employee value misalignment and weaken corporate culture. Career preferences for job-hopping provide incentives for managers to signal their leadership quality in the labor market. We capture managers' and employees' attention allocation across different cultural values using data from conference calls and Glassdoor. We predict and find that job-hopping managers direct their attention away from soft cultural values (e.g., respect and integrity) that are less observable by the external labor market. Furthermore, job-hopping managers who pay insufficient attention to soft cultural values fail to address the concerns that employees have in their everyday work, resulting in lower overall employee culture ratings. Our study highlights the significance of managers' career preferences in shaping different cultural values and offers implications for firms selecting senior managers.

We analyze how bank sentiment affects bank liquidity hoarding, distinguishing unexplained beliefs of bank managers from fundamental-based beliefs. We build a bank management sentiment measure from textual analysis of 10-Ks and utilize a comprehensive bank liquidity hoarding measure. We find that negative bank sentiment increases liquidity hoarding not warranted by a bank's fundamental conditions or external circumstances. Further analysis confirms that our findings reflect bank volition rather than being driven solely by borrowers or depositors. We address endogeneity concerns using exogenous weather conditions as instruments. Overall, our findings suggest that bank sentiment can influence how much liquidity banks provide to the economy and financial system.

This study examines the relationship between government subsidies and income smoothing using a sample of US-listed firms. We find that subsidized firms smooth their earnings more aggressively than their unsubsidized peers. This finding is consistent with the reasoning that subsidized firms bear higher political costs and have more incentives to smooth earnings to avoid public attention. In addition, smoothing by subsidized firms is more pronounced when the subsidies are granted through non-tax-related channels than through tax-based channels, and the positive association between government subsidies and income smoothing is stronger for firms under higher public scrutiny and with less transparent information environments. Further analysis shows that smoothing by subsidized firms serves mainly to obfuscate earnings and that subsidized firms that smooth earnings tend to continue receiving subsidies in the future. Overall, our results help explain the role of government subsidies in shaping firms' accounting and disclosure choices.

Drawing on Robert Michels's “iron law” of oligarchy, this study examines a governance crisis that unfolded at one of the world's largest professional accounting bodies (PABs)—CPA Australia. We leverage Michels's century-old contribution to the social sciences to explore how this crisis sheds light on the challenges that PAB governance arrangements can pose when PAB leadership and membership priorities conflict. By applying Michels's seminal work to theorize the origins, escalation, leadership collapse, and eventual resolution of this PAB governance crisis, we illuminate how governance arrangements fueled conflict and fostered a democratic deficit that frustrated sections of the membership in their attempts to debate issues, exercise accountability on leadership matters, and become involved in governance reform. Overall, our analysis reveals that despite espoused principles of equity and participation, PABs are vulnerable to oligarchy impacting how their leaders relate to the interests of their members. Implications for the capacity of PABs to accommodate member conflict and for member participation in the current-day professional context are discussed.

We examine shareholders' perceptions about how external tax advisors contribute to corporate tax planning. As residual claimants of corporate tax planning, shareholders benefit from lower corporate taxes, but also bear the financial and reputational costs of subsequent tax enforcement. Despite the influential advisory role of external tax advisors in corporate tax planning, existing research on how shareholders perceive this role is limited. Using event study methods and exploiting the heightened regulation of tax advice through the covered opinion rules as a setting, we observe average and cross-sectional stock returns consistent with shareholders perceiving external tax advisors as contributing unfavorably to tax planning by promoting excessively risky strategies. We further find that risky and overall tax planning declined across firms after the enactment of the rules, consistent with shareholders' perceptions about tax advisors' contributions to firms' tax planning. Overall, our findings contribute to research on shareholder perceptions and valuation of tax planning, and have important implications for practice, where regulatory oversight of external tax advisors remains a significant concern.

This paper studies accounting and silence. Building on studies of accounting talk and introducing theories of “silencing,” we highlight the role of accounting silences in the production of engaging organizational conversations. Through a qualitative case study, we identify three forms of silence—the unspeakable, the unsaid, and the inaudible—and their links to accounting. Silences create motivations to engage in further accounting talk, but they also deny certain groups a voice in those conversations. An impression of participation, openness, and transparency emerges despite unequal access and the silencing of certain groups. Accounting itself can be silenced to avoid uncomfortable topics, potential problems, and anxiety-inducing uncertainties. This silencing may serve to preserve a useful ignorance, avoid being in the know, and build alluring narratives and engaging conversations. Accounting silences sustain such conversations by protecting them from alternative voices, unsettling knowledge, and narratives that are incompatible with the organization's preferred story.