Journal of Accounting & Economics最新文献

This study examines whether and how financial statement comparability facilitates the dissemination of innovative knowledge between firms and stimulates the creation of new knowledge. Using cross-patent citations to track interfirm knowledge transfers, we find that comparability increases firms' incentives to learn from peers and create new patents that cite their peers' existing patents. The investigation into the mechanism reveals that comparability improves firms’ ability to estimate the monetary value of peer knowledge and predict their own financial benefits from knowledge acquisition. The impact of comparability is more pronounced when peer knowledge is more publicly accessible or of higher monetary value. Consequently, the acquired knowledge fosters follow-on innovation, enabling firms to produce more patents with greater economic significance. Evidence from two quasi-natural experiments suggests that our findings are plausibly causal. Overall, our study highlights the important role of accounting comparability in facilitating knowledge dissemination.

We study credit access in informal economies where market institutions, such as financial reporting systems, auditing, and courts, are nonexistent or function poorly. Using the setting of a large bazaar in India, we find that community membership plays a vital role in access to credit. Wholesalers are more likely to provide credit and offer greater amounts of credit to within-community retailers, and are more lenient when these retailers are delinquent. Furthermore, wholesalers who lent preferentially to their community retailers pre-COVID are more likely to receive help from their community following the COVID-19–related income shock, particularly from same-community landlords and suppliers. Also, wholesalers with low endowments, those with greater within-community information flow about them, and those facing income shocks are more likely to provide preferential credit to their community retailers. Our findings are consistent with an indirect reciprocity mechanism explaining within-community credit flows.

When firms are forced to publicly disclose financial information, credit rating agencies are generally expected to improve their risk assessments. Theory predicts such an information quality effect but also suggests an adverse reputational concerns effect since credit analysts may become increasingly concerned about alleged rating failures. We empirically examine these predictions using a large-scale quasi-natural experiment in Germany, where a new compliance regime required firms to disclose annual financial statements publicly. Consistent with the reputational concerns hypothesis, we find an average increase in credit rating downgrades that is entirely driven by changes in the discretionary assessments of credit analysts rather than changes in firm fundamentals. Following public disclosure regulations, analysts tend to give positive private information less weight in their risk assessments while assigning greater weight to negative public information. A final set of results indicates that professional credit providers recognize that the resulting downgrades are not warranted.

Distinguishing between recurring and nonrecurring components of earnings is a critical task in financial analysis and valuation. Academics and quantitative investors often rely on measures of recurring and nonrecurring components derived from standardized financial databases. We use unobserved components modeling and the Kalman smoother to obtain efficient ex-post estimates of the recurring and nonrecurring components of annual earnings. We then show that popular measures are significantly misspecified and that investors appear to anticipate a significant portion of the misspecification. Finally, we identify certain misclassified items that drive misspecification and provide algorithms to improve their ex-ante classification.

We study the role of litigation risk in M&A valuations. Specifically, we hypothesize that litigation risk leads to strategic valuations in fairness opinions (FOs) obtained in M&A transactions. Employing a regulatory shock to merger litigation risk and focusing on the most common valuation techniques – peer firm comparables and DCF analysis – we find that target-sought FOs exhibit lower valuations when litigation risk is high. The effect is concentrated in deals with greater agency conflicts between target management and outside shareholders. Furthermore, downward-biased valuations reduce appraisal litigation but are also associated with lower premiums. In contrast to prior work suggesting that target-sought FOs are used to negotiate a higher takeover price, our findings imply that they are used, at least in part, to mitigate litigation risk and facilitate successful deal completion. Our findings are relevant to academics, practitioners, and regulators interested in M&A price formation, and highlight the role litigation plays therein.

We examine employee responses to CEO activism, the increasingly common practice of CEOs taking public stances on socio-political issues. CEO activism may bolster employees' identification with their organizations and strengthen shared beliefs among employees. Alternatively, CEO activism may alienate employees if CEO stances contrast with employees' ideologies. We find that employee satisfaction is higher when CEOs engage in activism that is aligned with employees’ ideologies. Furthermore, firms with CEO activism experience a net inflow of productive, ideologically-aligned inventors, which contributes to increased firm-level innovation. The improvements in employee satisfaction and innovation constitute an important channel that connects aligned CEO activism to increased firm value.

This study examines the capital-market effects of tipper-tippee insider trading laws. To do so, I exploit the unexpected decision issued by the Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in U.S. v. Newman 773 F.3d 438, which reduced legal jeopardy for Second Circuit-based market participants prior to being overturned. Consistent with Newman constraining insider trading enforcement, I find strong evidence of plausible insider trading in the Second Circuit following the ruling. I also document a substantial reduction in general trading activity in Second Circuit stocks, as well as an increase in daily quoted spreads and the price impact of trading. These findings are consistent with unchecked insider trading increasing transaction costs and crowding-out investors. In total, my results show that tipper-tippee insider trading restrictions play an important role in bolstering market integrity, and that market participants can to some degree counteract insider trading when public regulation is constrained.

This paper examines whether and how public environmental enforcement affects private lenders’ monitoring efforts and the effectiveness of such monitoring. We capture lender monitoring using environmental covenants in loan agreements. Consistent with the prediction that stringent public environmental enforcement increases lenders’ monitoring incentives, we find that in the presence of higher environmental regulatory enforcement intensity, lenders are more likely to use environmental covenants when lending to polluting borrowers and when the loans are secured by real property collateral. Moreover, consistent with the prediction that stringent public environmental enforcement facilitates lender monitoring, we find that environmental covenants are more effective in reducing borrowers’ toxic chemical releases when environmental regulatory enforcement is stronger. Taken together, our findings corroborate the importance of public environmental enforcement in inducing lenders’ monitoring efforts, as well as the joint role of public enforcement and private lender monitoring in curbing corporate pollution.

We study the interaction between optimal financial reporting rules and managers' incentives to gather additional information about firm performance. Accounting-based covenants transfer control rights to lenders, allowing them to take corrective actions. After the accounting report is released, the manager can exert effort to uncover whether the report is a false alarm or unduly optimistic. The manager's incentive to gather information stems from optimal incentive contracts and private benefits of control that she loses when the project is liquidated. We derive conditions under which managerial information acquisition renders conservative reporting optimal for shareholders and show that these conditions relax when the manager derives greater private benefits from the project or the cost of information acquisition declines. Our model provides novel explanations for existing empirical findings and offers new predictions with respect to covenant waivers, debt contract renegotiations, and the frequency of corrective actions.