Journal of Accounting Research最新文献

GAAP provisions in loan contracts specify how to address the effect of accounting changes on financial covenants. I document a pronounced upward trend in and the dominance of frozen-on-request (FOR) GAAP provisions, which incorporate accounting changes unless either the borrower or the lender requests a freeze. FOR GAAP streamlines the process of incorporating accounting changes into covenant calculations by obviating the need for renegotiations and prevents opportunistic GAAP freezes by requiring good faith renegotiations. Therefore, FOR GAAP is more likely to incorporate accounting changes beneficial to covenant informativeness, leading to lower false positives (i.e., Type I errors of financial covenant violations) and false negatives (i.e., Type II errors of financial covenant violations). Based on a large sample of loan contracts, I find that FOR GAAP decreases false positives and false negatives after controlling for self-selection bias and that the decrease is more pronounced when accounting changes relevant to financial covenants are more significant. My study provides new evidence of the role accounting standards and GAAP provisions play in debt contracting efficiency.

Using the public release of comment letters on EDGAR to capture a regime shift toward regulatory transparency, we examine whether an increase in transparency affects regulators’ effort and work performance. We find that the SEC staff reviews more filings and more documents per filing following the disclosure regime shift. These effects are incrementally stronger for firms with comment letters that are expected to attract greater investor or public monitoring. Furthermore, under the new regime, reviews are more timely. Upon the regime switch, the likelihood of a restatement (receiving a comment letter) decreases (increases) for filings that are reviewed. After receiving a comment letter, a firm with signs of potential fraud is more likely to be investigated, and this effect becomes more pronounced under the new regime. Altogether, our findings suggest that publicly disclosing regulators’ work output can mitigate moral hazard (i.e., increase regulators’ work input), improving their work performance.

We show that information complementarities play an important role in the spillover of transparency shocks. We exploit the revelation of financial misconduct by S&P 500 firms, and in a “Stacked Difference-in-Differences” design, find that the implied cost of capital increases for “close” industry peers of the fraudulent firms relative to “distant” industry peers. The spillover effect is particularly strong when the close peers and the fraudulent firm share common analyst coverage and common institutional ownership, which have been shown to be powerful proxies for fundamental linkages and information complementarities. We provide evidence that increase in the cost of capital of peer firms is due, at least in part, to “beta shocks.” Disclosure by close peers—especially those with co-coverage and co-ownership links—also increases following fraud revelation. Although disclosure remains high in the following years, the cost of equity starts to decrease.

We explore how a supervisor's hierarchical rank affects the extent to which employees’ targets reflect their past performance. Literature documents that supervisors do not fully ratchet targets for past performance, arguably because the commitment not to penalize successful employees with more difficult targets alleviates the severity of the ratchet effect. We argue that commitment is less credible in organizational hierarchies where a middle manager sets employees’ targets. Using data from an organization comprised of three hierarchical layers, we consistently find that a middle manager's exposure to performance pressure is positively associated with the ratcheting of the employees’ targets. Moreover, we show that management at headquarters reduces a middle manager's performance pressure when most of her employees missed their targets in the previous period. Overall, the results imply that the hierarchical rank is an important determinant of the credibility of a supervisor's commitment to deemphasize past performance in target setting.

The economic role of an accounting regime is to increase welfare through its effects—in conjunction with complementary institutions—on firm and household behavior. I review three major streams of the archival literature (real effects; price effects, including value relevance; and costly contracting), in terms of what they can and cannot reveal as proxies for welfare effects. One conclusion is that the partial correlations and average effects that predominate in this literature have provided valuable insights into the role of accounting in the economy, but provide limited and misleading proxies for welfare effects. A major concern is that teachers, students, and researchers—indeed, regulators and standard setters—raised on this literature could lose sight of, and underestimate, the fundamental contribution of accounting to aggregate welfare.

Auditors are expected to identify and resolve material misstatements (MMs) in management's financial statements. However, beyond the audit opinion, the audit process is opaque. To address this, we independently survey 462 audit partners and interview 24 audit partners, CFOs, and audit committee members on how partners assess and address MM risk, resolve MMs, and the consequences of MMs. Partners identify MMs in approximately 9% (15%) of public (private) engagements and use qualitative factors to waive apparent MMs. Loan covenant and going-concern issues increase MM risk more than earnings benchmark issues. Partners point to a variety of both auditor and client factors as threats to audit effectiveness. Partners often rely on rapport with management and involve the national office and audit committee in resolving MMs. Partner incentives around restatements are context specific. Our results provide new insights into the auditor's role in financial reporting that are relevant to academics, practitioners, and regulators.

This paper reports the results of a field experiment investigating how attributes of carbon footprint information affect consumer choice in a large dining facility. Our hypotheses and research methods were preregistered via the Journal of Accounting Research’s registration-based editorial process. Manipulating the measurement units and visualizations of carbon footprint information on food labels, we quantify effects on consumers’ food choices. Treated consumers choose less carbon-intensive dishes, reducing their food-related carbon footprint by up to 9.2%, depending on the treatment. Effects are strongest for carbon footprint information expressed in monetary units (“environmental costs”) and color-coded in the familiar traffic-light scheme. A postexperimental survey shows that these effects obtain although few respondents self-report concern for the environmental footprint of their meal choices. Our study contributes to the accounting literature by using an information-processing framework to shed light on the information usage and decision-making processes of an increasingly important user group of accounting information: consumers.