Journal of Accounting Research最新文献

The Journal of Accounting Research is proud to recognize our top referees of the previous calendar year. The senior editors selected those named below for their “2023 Excellence in Refereeing” based on the quality and the number of reviews they had performed for the journal during the years 2022 and 2023. We thank the referees for their invaluable services to the journal.

Darren Bernard, University of Washington

Anne Beyer, Stanford University

Jannis Bischof, University of Mannheim

Elizabeth Blankespoor, University of Washington

Matthew Bloomfield, University of Pennsylvania

Khrystyna Bochkay, University of Miami

Mark Bradshaw, Boston College

Matthias Breuer, Columbia University

Ulf Brüggemann, Humboldt University Berlin

Jung Ho Choi, Stanford University

Lisa De Simone, University of Texas, Austin

Yiwei Dou, New York University

Raphael Duguay, Yale University

Atif Ellahie, University of Utah

Henry Eyring, Duke University

Vivian Fang, Indiana University

Elia Ferracuti, Duke University

Fabrizio Ferri, University of Miami

Henry Friedman, University of California, Los Angeles

John Gallemore, University of North Carolina

João Granja, University of Chicago

Nicholas Guest, Cornell University

Allen Huang, Hong Kong University of Science & Technology

Xu Jiang, Duke University

Zachary Kaplan, Washington University, St. Louis Sehwa Kim, Columbia University

Rebecca Lester, Stanford University

Miao Liu, Boston College

Yao Lu, Cornell University

William Mayew, Duke University

Charles McClure, University of Chicago

Maximilian Muhn, University of Chicago

Anya Nakhmurina, Yale University

Allison Nicoletti, University of Pennsylvania

Gaizka Ormazabal, IESE Business School

Thomas Rauter, University of Chicago

Delphine Samuels, University of Chicago

Timothy Shields, Chapman University

Nemit Shroff, MIT

Gurpal Sran, New York University

Christopher Stewart, University of Chicago

Lorien Stice-Lawrence, University of Southern California

Andrew Sutherland, MIT

Sorabh Tomar, Southern Methodist University

Rahul Vashishtha, Duke University

David Veenman, University of Amsterdam

Braden Williams, University of Texas, Austin

Gwen Yu, University of Michigan

Frank Zhou, University of Pennsylvania

Christina Zhu, University of Pennsylvania

We compile a novel data set on mandatory environmental, social, and governance (ESG) disclosure around the world to analyze the stock liquidity effects of such disclosure mandates. We document a positive effect of ESG disclosure mandates on firm-level stock liquidity. The effects are strongest if the disclosure requirements are implemented by government institutions, not on a comply-or-explain basis, and coupled with strong enforcement by informal institutions. Firms with weaker information environments benefit more from ESG disclosure mandates. Our results support the view that ESG disclosure regulation improves the information environment and has beneficial capital market effects.

Many firms use relative stock performance to evaluate and incentivize their CEOs. We document that such firms routinely disclose information that harms their peers' stock prices, and sometimes explicitly mention the harmed peers, by name, in these disclosures. Consistent with deliberate sabotage, peer-harming disclosures appear to be aimed at peers whose stock price depressions are most likely to benefit the disclosing firms' CEOs. The pricing effect of these disclosures does not reverse, suggesting that the disclosures contain legitimate information regarding peers' prospects. In sum, our results suggest that relative performance evaluation in CEO pay motivates CEOs to internalize the externalities of their disclosures, and strategically disclose information that harms peers' stock prices, in order to improve their firms' relative standing within their peer group.

Formal theory and empirical research are complementary in building and advancing the body of knowledge in accounting in order to understand real-world phenomena. We offer thoughts on opportunities for empiricists and theorists to collaborate, build on each other's work, and iterate over models and data to make progress. For empiricists, we see room for more descriptive work, more experimental work on testing formal theories, and more work on quantifying theoretical parameters. For theorists, we see room for theories explicitly tied to descriptive evidence, new theories on individuals' decision making in a data-rich world, theories focused on accounting institutions and measurement issues, and richer theories for guiding empirical work and providing practical insights. We also encourage explicitly combining formal theory and empirical models by having both in one paper and by structural estimation.

We provide large-sample evidence on whether U.S. publicly traded corporations use voluntary disclosures about their commitments to employee diversity opportunistically. We document significant discrepancies between companies' external stances on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) and their hiring practices. Firms that discuss DEI excessively relative to their actual employee gender and racial diversity (“diversity washers”) obtain superior scores from environmental, social, and governance (ESG) rating organizations and attract more investment from institutional investors with an ESG focus. These outcomes occur even though diversity-washing firms are more likely to incur discrimination violations and have negative human-capital-related news events. Our study provides evidence consistent with growing allegations of misleading statements from firms about their DEI initiatives and highlights the potential consequences of selective ESG disclosures.

We examine how financial disclosure policy affects a firm manager's strategy to innovate within a two-period bandit problem featuring two production methods: an old method with a known probability of success, and a new method with an unknown probability. Exploring the new method in the first period provides the manager with decision-useful information for the second period, thus creating a real option that is unavailable under exploiting the old known production method. Voluntary disclosure of the firm's financial performance provides the manager with another option to potentially conceal initial failure from the market. The interaction of these two options determines the manager's incentive to explore. In equilibrium, a myopic manager who cares about the interim market price may over- or under-explore compared to the optimal exploration strategy that maximizes firm value. Our analysis shows that firms operating in an environment with voluntary disclosure early in the trial stage and mandated requirement later are most motivated to explore, while firms subject to early mandated disclosure and late voluntary disclosure are least likely to do so. We also provide empirical predictions about the link between the disclosure environment and the intensity and efficiency of corporate innovation.

The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) is decentralized, wherein field offices coordinated at the state level undertake inspections. We study whether this structure can lead to interstate frictions in sharing information and how this impacts firms’ compliance with workplace safety laws. We find that firms caught violating in one state subsequently violate less in that state but violate more in other states. Despite this pattern, and in keeping with information frictions, violations in one state do not trigger proactive OSHA inspections in other states. Moreover, firms face lower monetary penalties when subsequent violations occur across state lines, likely due to the lack of documentation necessary to assess severe penalties. Finally, firms are more likely to shift violating behavior into states with greater information frictions. Our findings suggest that internal information within regulators impacts the likelihood and location of corporate misconduct.