Journal of Accounting Research最新文献

We examine firms' trade-offs in their voluntary disclosure decisions following negative media coverage of climate change incidents. By combining a keyword discovery algorithm and a fine-tuned BERT model, we identify “hard” and “soft” climate disclosures on Twitter. Our findings indicate that firms tend to issue climate tweets as a rapid response to negative climate incidents. Additionally, firms with a history of hard climate change disclosure, as measured by ESG reports, are more likely to issue climate-related responses than firms without such a history. Furthermore, we show that prior hard disclosure is associated with hard responses when the incident receives moderate media attention, but with soft responses when the incident receives low media attention. Our findings provide empirical insights for dynamic disclosure theory by illustrating how prior disclosure shapes firms' response strategies to negative media coverage.

We conduct an experiment to investigate the use of peer evaluations for compensation purposes. Although organizations often rely on peer evaluations for incentive compensation, it is not well understood how peer feedback should be used and designed to ensure non-distorted evaluations and motivate effort provision. We study peer evaluations in form of bonus allocation proposals, thereby enabling a quantifiable test of our hypothesis. We distinguish between discretionary use (i.e., allocation by the manager) and formulaic use (i.e., allocation by the team via the average) of self-including and self-excluding proposals. We find that, relative to self-including proposals, self-excluding proposals are less distorted, irrespective of use, but lead to more effort provision only under formulaic use. Under discretionary use, the benefits of self-excluding proposals are offset, as managerial biases enter bonus allocations. In sum, our findings illustrate benefits of delegating bonus allocations to teams through formulaic use of self-excluding peer evaluations and extend the understanding of how organizations can effectively incorporate peer evaluations into incentive compensation.

This paper examines how increased competition among environmental, social, and governance (ESG) rating agencies relates to ESG rating quality. We exploit the entry of Sustainalytics as a new ESG rating agency in 2010. We conduct a difference-in-differences analysis and provide three main findings. First, we find that higher competition decreases incumbents' ESG rating disagreements of the same scope. The negative relation between competition and ESG rating disagreement persists for same-scope rating metrics not covered by Sustainalytics, suggesting that neither learning nor herding drive the results. The relationship between competition and rating disagreement strengthens for firms with more ESG disclosures, which generally require more effort to analyze. Second, we find that incumbents' ratings of ESG concerns are more strongly associated with future negative ESG news for firms additionally covered by Sustainalytics. This finding is consistent with competition improving ratings' ability to predict future negative ESG incidents. Third, we find that incumbents evaluate more difficult-to-measure outcome metrics for firms covered by Sustainalytics, consistent with competition inducing more effort. Overall, our findings suggest that competition serves as an implicit disciplining mechanism of ESG rating agencies' quality.

Managers prioritize favorable analysts during earnings calls, reinforcing analysts’ incentives for optimism. However, managers also frequently interact with unfavorable analysts, and this study examines the determinants and benefits of these interactions. I find that managers interact more with unfavorable analysts when compelled to do so. I then examine two likely benefits of these interactions. First, unfavorable analysts attenuate their negative views after interacting with managers. Second, price reactions to management forecasts are stronger for managers who regularly interact with unfavorable analysts, consistent with enhanced reporting credibility. Finally, using peer firm restatements as exogenous shocks to investors’ perceptions of accounting quality, I find that nonrestating firms with managers who regularly interact with unfavorable analysts experience attenuated negative returns relative to other nonrestating peers. Overall, the empirical evidence indicates firms experience significant benefits when managers interact with unfavorable analysts and these benefits persist amongst compelled and voluntary interactions.

We examine the effect of internal employee coordination on customer trust, focusing specifically on employees’ responsiveness to each other as an important, quantifiable, and objective aspect of internal coordination. Using proprietary data from a company with exogenous assignment of employees to teams that serve individual customers, we study how inter-employee responsiveness influences customer trust. Each customer is served via an app-based group chat by a randomly assigned team of employees. Our data include more than 2 million group chat messages with over 16 thousand customers. We find that inter-employee responsiveness serves as a credible signal that helps build customer trust, as evidenced by their subsequent contracting choices. The effect is more pronounced when the signal is (1) more frequent and (2) more intense. Our findings highlight the novel value of internal employee responsiveness as a credible signal that helps build trust with external stakeholders.