Contemporary Accounting Research最新文献

Management teams often avoid answering questions during conference call question and answer sessions (Q&As). Viewing this as an information asymmetry issue, accounting scholars have suggested that this behavior is ill-advised and that non-answers signal to investors the suppression of bad news. In this article, we demonstrate that this argument lacks nuance. Instead, we argue that answers and non-answers necessarily coexist and are codependent. Our contribution stems from our social interactionist lens, whereby we draw on interdisciplinary perspectives of workplace silence to make sense of our data. We propose three explanations for managerial non-answers, namely that they are used (1) defensively, (2) reflectively, and (3) negotiatively. Despite the seeming complexity, analysts claim they can make sense of what managers are able to say in this forum, and by extension, what they do (or perhaps, can) not. From here, we argue that analysts are socialized to managerial non-answers. Despite this, there is general concern that investors allow an innate fear of “silence” to prejudice their judgment of non-answers. Thus, we highlight a communication gap between management, intermediary, and investor. On the one hand, this implies a source of market inefficiency, but on the other it points toward a source of potential value in sell-side analyst work, specifically, their experience and expertise in social interaction.

Securities litigation risk is a well-recognized yet underexplored source of financial reporting complexity or unreadability. This study examines the effect of litigation risk on the readability of corporate financial reports. The 1999 Silicon Graphics Inc. (SGI) court ruling unexpectedly reduced litigation risk for firms within the Ninth Circuit Court's jurisdiction. Using a difference-in-differences design centered on the SGI court ruling, we find that, while the readability of financial reports generally declines over the sample period, treated firms in the Ninth Circuit experience a comparatively smaller decline in readability than control firms in other states after the ruling. Put differently, treated firms experience a relative improvement in reporting readability following the ruling. This effect is concentrated among firms prone to securities litigation and those with greater external financing needs, but it is muted for firms engaging in earnings management. Furthermore, improved reporting readability among treated firms can be partially attributed to alleviated concerns about the adequacy of cautionary language, as evidenced by a significant decrease in negative forward-looking statements, particularly risk-related ones. Collectively, our findings suggest that securities litigation risk contributes to reduced readability in financial reporting.

This study uses valuation allowances (VAs) for deferred tax assets to examine whether hedge fund activists (HFAs) use and affect financial reporting of income taxes. Specifically, we investigate whether HFAs target firms with VAs and whether target firms are more likely to release VAs post-intervention. We find that the existence, magnitude, and increases in VAs increase the marginal probability that HFAs will target a firm by between 12% and 24%. We also find that target firms are 4.6% more likely to release VAs following the intervention, and this effect persists for up to 2 years. Releases of VAs appear to stem from implemented tax avoidance strategies and changes in financial reporting of income taxes rather than real changes in operating performance or earnings management. Overall, HFAs appear to understand the interplay between tax planning and financial reporting of income taxes and use both to unlock value in target firms.

Recent research into the uses of accounting as a technology of government has used Foucault's notion of “counter-conduct” to shed light on various ways in which the governed can seek to alter the regimes to which they are subjected. This paper unpacks the notion of counter-conduct further in order to develop a clearer conceptualization of how regimes of government can change over time, with or without clearly identifiable attempts by the governed to influence such changes. We develop our argument based on a longitudinal field study of sustainable waste management practices in a municipality in the English East Midlands. We track the municipality's attempts to become more sustainable in the context of an evolving central government performance management regime that went through a series of legislative and administrative iterations—namely, Best Value, Comprehensive Performance Assessment, and Comprehensive Area Assessment. We conceptualize these iterations of central performance management and the related changes in local government practices and technologies of governing as a series of overlapping “modes of governing” (Bulkeley et al., 2007, Environment and Planning A, 39(11), 2733–2753). We suggest that accounting research can benefit from the notion of modes of governing because it sheds light on the theoretically expected, but empirically underresearched, copresence of multiple rationales, programs, and technologies of governing, all operating at the same time.

This study examines the impact of the presence of institutional dual-holders, whose portfolios hold both loans and equity securities of the same firms, on those firms' voluntary disclosures. Using mergers between institutional shareholders and lenders to the same firms as exogenous shocks to identify firms with institutional dual-holders that have high relative equity ownership, we document that such firms are less likely to provide management forecasts and disclose fewer voluntary 8-K items. In cross-sectional analyses, we find that the reduction in voluntary disclosures is more pronounced when institutional dual-holders have higher board representation and when firms have lower litigation risk. In addition, we find that firms with institutional dual-holders provide more private disclosures to their lenders via loan contract covenants. Additional analyses indicate that the impact of institutional dual-holders on corporate disclosures is driven by both their monitoring and trading incentives.

Statement of Financial Accounting Standards (SFAS) 141 (Accounting Standards Codification [ASC] 805) requires that firms record identifiable assets and liabilities acquired in business combinations at fair value. While the FASB argued that these fair values should provide users with incremental decision-useful information, opponents have continuously argued that they are too difficult to reliably estimate and could be subject to managerial discretion. Using hand-collected data from US mergers and acquisitions, we find that, on average, fair value adjustments predict future cash flows incrementally beyond pre-deal book values and cash flows, goodwill, and other firm and deal characteristics. We also find that the relation between fair value adjustments and future cash flows varies predictably based on several factors that affect managers' ability and incentives to provide accurate estimates. Furthermore, despite prevailing concerns about their usefulness, we find that fair values for intangible assets predict future cash flows, on average. However, we find that this relation is driven primarily by the fair values of customer- and contract-related intangible assets and that the fair values of other types of identifiable intangibles do not necessarily convey incremental decision-useful information. Finally, we find that users appear to rely on the information conveyed by these disclosures, as evidenced by revisions to analysts' forecasts and changes in stock prices. Overall, our findings provide insight regarding the usefulness of current standards and users' reliance on fair values in business combinations.

We examine the effect of product market competitors' listing delays on incumbent firms' defensive strategies, including efforts in customer retention and acquisition as well as merger and acquisition (M&A) activities. To establish causality, we use four regulation-induced IPO suspensions in China that expose firms already approved for an IPO to indeterminate listing delays. Using a difference-in-differences design, we find that incumbent firms reduce efforts in customer retention and acquisition, as manifested in an increase in accounts receivable turnover and a decrease in selling expenses. Incumbent firms also reduce M&A activities, including high-premium and horizontal ones. The effects are stronger for incumbent firms that are subject to more intensive competition from the suspended firm, face larger competitive pressure from existing public firms, and are more financially constrained. Additionally, incumbent firms' managers reduce competition-related disclosures, and the firms' financial performance improves after competitors' listing delays. Consistent with the findings based on listing delays, we find that incumbent firms increase efforts in customer retention and acquisition and M&As surrounding competitors' IPO application and approval. Our paper sheds new light on the IPO peer effect, especially on how incumbent firms respond to the product market competitor's capital market entry.

Although it has always been important for firms that employees innovate predefined processes, the working environment in which employees implement these processes has significantly changed. Currently, the working environment is often characterized by employee surveillance; that is, the way in which employees conduct a process is monitored. In the current study, we present the results of an experiment examining the effect of process monitoring on process improvements by employees. Although previous accounting literature has reported negative effects of monitoring techniques on several organizational outcomes, we show that process monitoring can have a positive effect on employees' implementation of process improvements in the absence, but not in the presence, of a firm's error avoidance policy. Without an error avoidance policy, employees are motivated to create a favorable impression in front of management by implementing process improvements. This finding has important implications for business practice. From a broader perspective, we show that the influence of action controls depends on the parameters of a cultural control.

As early as 2015, financial regulators were developing disclosure frameworks aimed at enabling capital markets to price climate risks. Yet the literature on sustainability disclosure offers little insight into how regulatory agendas change, instead focusing on how nongovernmental organizations drive voluntary disclosure. To address this deficiency, this paper charts how financial regulators came to embrace climate risk, analyzing how an array of non-state initiatives became coordinated in highlighting climate-related impairment risks. This coordination is conceptualized via scholarship on decentered regulation, allowing a first, theoretical, contribution by constructing and demonstrating one analytical approach to studying substantive change on sustainability. This paper draws on a 25-month participant observation of a United Nations standard-setting project, supported by semi-structured interviews. This allows a second, empirical, contribution by mapping how an accounting device, the so-called “carbon budget” (the maximum amount of cumulative greenhouse gas emissions that limits the probability of exceeding 2°C of warming to 20%), coordinated this array of non-state action toward resolving a core trade-off: if we burn our current fossil fuel reserves, we will exceed our warming targets. The paper then shows how these coordinated efforts pressured regulatory authorities to intervene on how finance affects and is affected by climate change.