Contemporary Accounting Research最新文献

We introduce CRISK, a financial statement–based measure, to assess the systemic risk contribution of a financial firm. CRISK measures the capital shortfall of a financial firm conditional on severe distress in the entire system. Our measure complements the market-based measure, SRISK, introduced by Acharya et al. (2012, American Economic Review, 102(3), 59–64) and Brownlees and Engle (2017, Review of Financial Studies, 30(1), 48–79), in identifying systemically risky financial firms. While SRISK provides a timelier assessment using real-time stock market data, CRISK offers a more nuanced approach using accounting information and is tailored to the distinct characteristics of insurance firms and commercial banks. Our empirical analysis shows that (1) compared to CRISK, SRISK tends to overestimate capital shortfalls for insurance firms and for banks that hold a substantial portion of Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation–insured deposits while underestimating capital shortfalls for banks heavily reliant on uninsured deposits; (2) CRISK estimates of capital shortfall closely align with the actual capital injections received by financial firms during the financial crisis of 2007–2009; and (3) CRISK exhibits a significant positive correlation with short interest. Based on our findings, we recommend using SRISK as an initial screening tool to identify potential systemically risky financial firms, followed by refining the list and validating the expected capital shortfall using CRISK.

The IASB asserts that global stakeholder participation in the standard-setting process is critical for developing and maintaining high-quality accounting standards. However, the myriad languages used in countries that apply IFRS may impede this participation. We find that the IASB is less likely to receive comment letters from stakeholders in countries with languages that are linguistically distant from English. We also find that comment letters from more linguistically distant stakeholders are less likely to be quoted in IASB staff-prepared comment letter summaries, suggesting that they have less influence in the redeliberation process. Path analyses show that this result arises from language frictions being associated with reduced writing quality and originality. We also find that language frictions prevent participation in other standard-setting communication channels. Collectively, language frictions appear to impede the IASB's efforts to equitably obtain and consider valuable global feedback.

Granting decision rights to minority shareholders protects them from expropriation by controlling shareholders, but it simultaneously fosters a mismatch between decision rights and decision-relevant information. Using the setting of China's classified voting system (CVS), which requires minority shareholder approval for managerial proposals, this study investigates the effect of such a regulation on investment responsiveness to profitability and equity value attributable to growth options. Following the real-options-based valuation model, we document that the adoption of CVS diminishes both investment responsiveness and equity value. This reduction is attributed to heightened financial constraints following the CVS implementation. Further analyses show the negative impacts are more pronounced for firms experiencing greater information asymmetry, lower mutual fund holdings, and severe agency conflicts. Our evidence indicates that the efficacy of the regulation is contingent on the alignment between decision rights of minority shareholders and decision-relevant information available to them. Our findings thus provide insights to the regulators regarding the advantages and disadvantages of allowing minority shareholders direct influence over corporate decision-making.

This study investigates the association between managerial ability and cost rigidity. Cost rigidity refers to the relative proportion of fixed and variable costs. We expect that high-ability managers will assess the potential upside congestion and downside default risks and choose an appropriate level of cost rigidity accordingly. Our results show that, on average, high-ability managers tend to adopt a more rigid cost structure because they are more likely to realize favorable demand, and therefore, they retain higher capacity with more fixed inputs to alleviate potential congestion risk. We further document that firms with high-ability managers will exhibit a higher (lower) level of cost rigidity when facing higher congestion risk (default risk). Our results are robust to using a propensity score matching method, a CEO turnover subsample, and alternative measures of cost rigidity and managerial ability. Taken together, this study suggests that firms' capacity management choices vary with the level of managerial ability.

The provision of more frequent feedback to employees is increasing, although prior research has found mixed results as to the effect of increased feedback frequency on employee performance. Narcissism research identifies narcissistic oversensitivity as a key narcissistic subdimension that may result in particularly strong responses to performance feedback. We predict and find in an experiment that increased performance feedback frequency has a more negative impact on the performance accuracy of individuals with higher levels of narcissistic oversensitivity and that this negative interactive effect of feedback frequency and narcissistic oversensitivity is mitigated by the priming of a growth mindset. These results should be of practical interest to firms as they design their management control systems to improve employee performance, considering the variation in narcissistic oversensitivity among their employees. These results also contribute to recent accounting research on the effects of feedback frequency and employee mindsets.

Using a qualitative research design and drawing on an identity work perspective, we explore how LGBTQI+ professional accountants relate their self-identity to their professional occupation and manage their stigmatized identity at work. Sharing original empirical data from focus groups and semi-structured interviews with LGBTQI+ professional accountants, we show how they engage in inward-facing identity work by resisting stigmatizing pressures by conceiving of a self that is both outside the norm (“deviant”) and adapted to it (i.e., a deviant-adapted self). However, we also find that stigmatized identities can be embraced by participants as legitimate sources of distinct professional dispositions and a more powerful work ethic. This finding offers a less confrontational view of how marginalized identities and sexuality intersect with the accounting profession. In outward-facing processes of identity work, we show considerable variations in how and when participants communicate about their stigmatized identity. Finally, we highlight the collective dynamic of stigma management as a fundamental condition of possibility for targets to overcome the limits of atomized individual action. However, this collective dynamic entails the risk of all targets being absorbed into a collective representation and social-identity that either makes them invisible, or directly opposes certain aspects of their self-identity. In this respect, we show how some of our participants actively contribute to the creation of a collective social-identity to combat stigmatization within firms, which in turn generates symbolic power differentials and symbolic violence within LGBTQI+ professional accountants.

Evaluating organizational effectiveness is a significant challenge for nonprofit donors making donation allocation decisions. Donations may be misallocated if organizational effectiveness is inadequately assessed, and donors, who are often organizational outsiders, rely on nonprofit disclosures on IRS Form 990 to make such assessments. We examine whether donors value volunteer commitment, as measured by the number of volunteers that nonprofits disclose on Form 990, alongside financial and governance disclosures in assessing organizational effectiveness. Donors and volunteers prefer to make respective gifts of money and time to nonprofits that are effective in furthering their missions. Based on the premise that volunteers, as organizational insiders, are better positioned than donors to judge the impact of their contributions, we hypothesize that volunteer commitment provides value-relevant information to donors for use in assessing imprecise effectiveness signals—namely, the program ratio and corporate governance disclosures. Consistent with this, we find that the value relevance of the program ratio and corporate governance disclosures to donors is increasing with the level of volunteer commitment. These results suggest that donors view volunteer commitment as a signal of effectiveness, useful in interpreting other signals of effectiveness. The evidence is more pronounced among nonprofits that report more credible volunteer disclosures, have a larger proportion of sophisticated donors, and are more complex. These findings have implications for regulators considering nonprofit disclosure policies, as well as nonprofit managers and directors engaging volunteers.

Discretionary income smoothing has been argued to increase bank opacity and degrade financial system stability by making banks more difficult to monitor. However, no direct empirical association between discretionary smoothing and opacity has been established to date. We argue that smoothing could reflect either the opportunistic exercise of discretion that disconnects loan loss provisions (LLPs) from changes in underlying credit quality, consistent with smoothing increasing opacity, or an informative exercise of discretion to communicate forward-looking information about loan losses. We examine the association between discretionary smoothing and the informativeness of LLPs for a sample of banks from 1994 to 2019 and find that discretionary smoothing is, on average, associated with more informative LLPs. However, this association is nuanced, with cross-sectional differences and changes over time. We find evidence that an intervention by the SEC into bank LLP practices in the late 1990s curbed opportunistic smoothing via provisioning for homogeneous loans. Subsequently, smoothing is associated with more informative provisions, including for banks with both more homogeneous and more heterogeneous loan portfolios. Our findings are inconsistent with the notion that smoothing may be associated with greater opacity.

Public firms that go private are no longer subject to SEC financial reporting requirements. This study examines peer firms' disclosure responses following the lost information spillover from going-private events. We first support the lost information transfer, finding evidence that analyst forecasts of peers' earnings are less accurate and more disperse and that peer liquidity is lower immediately following going-private transactions. In response, industry peers increase disclosure quality in mandatory filings. Peers that enhance disclosure regain some of the lost informational benefits. The disclosure response is most evident in firms that rely more on intra-industry information spillover, firms with lower competitive concerns, and firms with the greatest deteriorations in their information environments after going-private activity. Our study examines an underexplored aspect of going-private transactions—the loss of public disclosure—and finds that the lost information imposes a negative externality that prompts peers to increase self-disclosure to regain informational benefits.

We examine whether auditor political connections are associated with the SEC's oversight of audit clients. Specifically, we test whether auditors' political action committee contributions are associated with three SEC oversight actions: comment letters, investigations, and Accounting and Auditing Enforcement Releases (AAERs). Consistent with higher political connections inducing heightened scrutiny from the SEC, we find that the clients of auditors with higher political connections are more likely to receive comment letters and face SEC investigations. However, conditional on SEC investigation, we find no association between auditor political connections and the issuance of AAERs. We consider heightened attention from investors and analysts toward audit clients as one possible mechanism leading to increased SEC scrutiny because auditor political connections could be perceived as a red flag. Using EDGAR downloads and the number of earnings forecast revisions, we document evidence consistent with the existence of this mechanism. These findings add to our understanding of how auditor political connections could influence SEC oversight over audit clients.