Journal of Accounting Literature最新文献

Banks, financial statement users, and accounting standard setters have long disagreed on the informativeness of banks’ statements of cash flows (SCFs) and there is a lack of relevant evidence in the literature. This paper examines the informativeness of the SCFs of U.S. commercial banks in two settings where SCFs are purported to be useful. The first analysis tests the incremental value relevance of banks’ SCFs beyond income statements and balance sheets and compares bank's SCFs with those of industrial firms. We find that banks’ SCFs have limited incremental value relevance, and are much less value relevant than industrial firms’ SCFs. The second analysis examines and finds no distress-predictive power of banks’ SCFs, especially in the presence of standard distress predictors. Overall, our results are consistent with the view that banks’ SCFs have limited informativeness.

This paper synthesizes existing experimental research in the area of investor perceptions and offers directions for future research. Investor-related experimental research has grown substantially, especially in the last decade, as it has made valuable contributions in establishing causal links, examining underlying process measures, and examining areas with little available data. Within this review, I examine 121 papers and identify three broad categories that affect investor perceptions: information format, investor features, and disclosure credibility. Information format describes how investors are influenced by information salience, information labeling, reporting and accounting complexity, financial statement recognition, explanatory disclosures, and proposed disclosure changes. Investor features describes investors’ use of heuristics, investor preferences, and the effect of investor experience. Disclosure credibility is influenced by external and internal assurance, management credibility, disclosure characteristics, and management incentives. Using this framework, I summarize the existing research and identify areas that would benefit from additional research.

The effect of tax policy on the repatriation of foreign earnings is a topic of ongoing discussion among policymakers, academics, and the popular press. It has become more salient due to the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA), which permanently removed repatriation tax. This paper synthesizes the academic literature examining US multinational firms’ responses to the repatriation tax holiday initiated by the 2004 American Jobs Creation Act (AJCA), which temporarily reduced the tax on the repatriation of foreign earnings. By synthesizing firm responses to the temporary tax reduction, we identify similarities and differences in: (1) theories about why and when repatriation tax affects firms’ repatriation decisions; (2) empirical evidence of whether repatriation tax affects firms’ repatriation decisions; and (3) empirical evidence of whether repatriation tax affects firms’ investment decisions. The analyses provide insights into the effect of the permanent removal of repatriation tax under the TCJA and explore avenues for future research. This synthesis of the AJCA literature informs tax research and practice as well as policymaking.

We document the emergence of the Lead Independent Director (LID) board role in a sample of U.S. firms from 1999–2015. We find that firms that adopt an LID board role are larger and have more independent boards, higher institutional investor holdings, and an NYSE listing. Firms with greater anticipated benefits from monitoring also adopt an LID role, e.g., firms with dual CEO-Chairman, with more takeover defense mechanisms, and with higher cash holdings. Using an event study methodology, we find that investors respond positively to the adoption of an LID board role. Lastly, using instrumental variables to address endogeneity in the LID board role, we find that firms with an LID are more likely to terminate poorly performing CEOs. Taken as a whole, these results suggest that the LID board role enhances firm value and improves the quality of corporate governance.

This study examines the information content of firms’ operations-related disclosures (ORDs) and the importance of these disclosures as an information source to stock markets relative to other commonly examined sources of information. I find that ORDs constitute a large portion of corporate press releases. These disclosures are associated with significant stock price reactions and trading volume. The stock price reactions to ORDs are greater than the reactions to 10-K/Q reports and are of similar magnitudes to the reactions to 8-K filings. On average, ORDs explain variation in firms’ quarterly returns to a similar degree as management earnings forecasts and 10-K/Q reports for the full sample and to a greater degree for small firms and firms with lower earnings quality.