Overlapping Membership on Audit and Compensation Committees and Financial Reporting Quality

This paper examines whether the audit committee members of a board improve financial reporting quality if they are also on their organisation's compensation committee. Audit committees are responsible for overseeing the financial reporting process of organisations and have been urged to broaden their understanding of business risk and of the incentives provided by their firms’ executive compensation structures. Acknowledging the interrelationships among executive compensation, risk‐taking and financial reporting quality, members of audit and compensation committees have been advocating more information sharing between the two committees. Using archival data from a sample of Australian Stock Exchange listed companies, and discretionary accruals as a proxy for financial reporting quality, this study finds that firms with overlapping committees have better quality financial reporting than those without such an overlap. Our evidence for this is stronger in cases where managers tend to manage earnings upwards in order to meet or beat earnings benchmarks. We also find that the beneficial effect of the existence of overlapping committees is adversely affected by the equity holdings of directors with overlapping memberships.     

Do short sellers anticipate late filings?

Exploiting the setting of firms that are unable to disclose timely financial reports and thus must file with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) the NT 10-K (Q) report, this study examines whether short sellers target firms with financial reporting weaknesses. We find that short interest increases in firms prior to the NT 10-K (Q) filing, suggesting that short sellers identify and target firms that cannot file their financial reports in a timely manner. Short selling is positively significantly related to subsequent late filing status, and is more pronounced in late filers with high newswire activity and with accelerated filing deadlines. Short selling of late filing firms is significantly negatively related to subsequent performance thereby suggesting that short sellers' trades pertinent to late filers are profitable. Overall, the results underscore a high information processing ability of short sellers in the setting of firms that exhibit financial reporting deficiencies.     

An investigation of SEC “Speech GAAP”

This study investigates the financial reporting regulation effects of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) staff comments made during the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA) Annual Current SEC & Public Company Oversight Board (PCAOB) Developments Conference in Washington, D.C. (SEC Conference). At this conference, the SEC staff communicates its preferences about areas where it believes companies are misapplying GAAP (Generally Accepted Accounting Principles). We call this communication SEC Speech GAAP. One outcome of the SEC Conference may be that companies re-evaluate their previous financial reporting by restating their financial statements. We find, first, that firms with restatement issues similar to those covered at the SEC Conference experience a decrease in the association between earnings and future cash flows after the restatement. Second, we find little market reaction to the disclosure of restatements related to SEC Conference issues, but the disclosure of non-conference related restatement issues has a significantly negative affect on investors’ valuation decisions. Our findings suggest that SEC Speech GAAP is associated with financial statements that are less informative to investors and investors find the valuation consequences of restatements prompted by SEC Speech GAAP to be less important than the valuation consequences for restatements prompted for other reasons.     

Consequences of Financial Reporting Failure for Outside Directors: Evidence from Accounting Restatements and Audit Committee Members

I use a sample of 409 companies that restated their earnings from 1997 to 2001 to examine penalties for outside directors, particularly audit committee members, when their companies experience accounting restatements. Penalties from lawsuits and Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) actions are limited. However, directors experience significant labor market penalties. In the three years after the restatement, director turnover is 48% for firms that restate earnings downward, 33% for a performance‐matched sample, 28% for firms that restate upward, and only 18% for technical restatement firms. For firms that overstate earnings, the likelihood of director departure increases in restatement severity, particularly for audit committee directors. In addition, directors of these firms are no longer present in 25% of their positions on other boards. This loss is greater for audit committee members and for more severe restatements. A matched‐sample analysis confirms this result. Overall, the evidence is consistent with outside directors, especially audit committee members, bearing reputational costs for financial reporting failure.     

Management’s tone change, post earnings announcement drift and accruals

This study explores whether the management discussion and analysis (MD&A) section of Forms 10-Q and 10-K has incremental information content beyond financial measures such as earnings surprises and accruals. It uses a classification scheme of words into positive and negative categories to measure the tone change in the MD&A section relative to prior periodic SEC filings. Our results indicate that short window market reactions around the SEC filing are significantly associated with the tone change of the MD&A section, even after controlling for accruals and earnings surprises. We show that management’s tone change adds significantly to portfolio drift returns in the window of 2 days after the SEC filing date through 1 day after the subsequent quarter’s preliminary earnings announcement, beyond financial information conveyed by accruals and earnings surprises. The drift returns are affected by the ability of the tone change signals to help predict the subsequent quarter’s earnings surprise but cannot be completely attributed to this ability. We also find that the incremental information of management’s tone change depends on the strength of the firm’s information environment.     

How frequently should listed companies report results?

On August 17, 2018, President Trump announced that he had asked the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to study whether U.S. listed companies should file interim financial statements at half-year intervals instead of on a quarterly basis. This essay examines the question underlying the President's concern: how frequently should public companies file interim statements? A review of accounting standards, regulations, and research reveals that there is (i) no agreed-upon best practice for reporting frequency, (ii) compelling evidence that analyst earnings estimates arising from interim reporting give rise to executive angst, and (iii) some evidence that lengthening reporting intervals will harm investors. The short-term implication of this essay is that readers of this journal should participate in SEC deliberation on this issue. The long-term implication is that we need to encourage accounting scholars from various disciplines to try to answer the President's question.     

Factors associated with price reactions and analysts’ forecast revisions around SEC filings

We investigate the extent to which rapid accessibility of financial reports filed electronically through the Securities and Exchange Commission’s EDGAR system has affected the ability of investors and security analysts to use accounting data in pricing decisions and forecasting. Consistent with prior research, we find evidence confirming that stock price reactions to SEC filings are significant in the EDGAR period but not the pre-EDGAR period. We also find significant revisions in analysts’ one-quarter-ahead earnings forecasts around SEC filings dates in both the pre-EDGAR and EDGAR periods. The price and forecast revision evidence indicates that financial analysts have used SEC filings all along. However, it is the advent of EDGAR that has allowed individual investors to also use 10-K and 10-Q filings. Cross-sectional analyses indicate that in the EDGAR period, trading volume around the preceding earnings announcements may influence individual investors to react to SEC filings. In contrast, variables such as the earnings surprise and the level of total accruals attract the attention of financial analysts. Interestingly, analysts appear to have been less likely in the pre-EDGAR period to bear the cost of searching out each SEC filing to identify those with large total accruals, which are known only after examining the SEC filing itself.     

Cost of Capital for Exempt Foreign Private Issuers: Information Risk Effect or Earnings Quality Effect? It Depends

We examine whether the information risk accompanying Foreign Private Issuers' (FPIs) exemptions from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) reporting requirements is associated with capital market penalties (measured by a higher cost of equity capital) and, further, the extent to which this information risk is mitigated by earnings quality. Our overall results indicate that exempt FPIs exhibit a higher cost of equity capital than reporting FPIs, and this relation still persists after controlling for earnings quality. Furthermore, we partition our sample into firms from strong and weak investor protection environments. Interestingly, similar to the results in Francis et al. (2008), for FPIs from strong investor protection regimes we find no difference in the cost of capital between exempt and filing FPIs, even after controlling for earnings quality. To the contrary, for FPIs from weak investor protection regimes, we find that the exemption is associated with a higher cost of equity capital, and that earnings quality does not significantly reduce the premium paid by these issuers.     

Cross-market information transfers of ADR firms: An investigation of emerging market economies

Level II and III ADRs permit issuers to be listed on the major U.S. exchanges with the stipulation that they comply with extensive SEC disclosure requirements. Foreign private issuers are compelled to file a set of audited financial statements prepared in accordance with U.S. GAAP, or alternatively, IFRS or Home Country Accounting Principles with attendant reconciliation to U.S. GAAP prior to 2008. Although the Form 20-F reconciliation is discontinued in 2008 for IFRS filers, non-U.S. issuers are required to satisfy other Form 20-F stipulations such as expanded Item 17 and Item 18 disclosures. We conjecture that non-U.S. firms choosing to be listed on the major U.S. exchanges will incur the added costs associated with the supplemental disclosure requirements in order to attract sufficient investor attention as to have the disclosures impounded in the home country equity share price in the manner described by Fishman et al. (1989). Because a prominent attribute of ADR firms is that they benefit from multiple-market trading, we investigate whether the Form 20-F disclosure cross-market information transfers are associated with emerging market economy status. We employ models of the cross-market ADR and equity security share returns and trading volume controlling for the emerging economy status and incremental firm-specific SEC Form 20-F accounting principles disclosures. Preliminary results indicate that (1) U.S. listed ADR firms from emerging economies experience greater cross-market information transfers associated with the SEC Form 20-F filing, and (2) that the increased cross-market information transfers associated with the SEC Form 20-F filing are proportional to the difference in quality of accounting principles employed for home country reporting purposes vis-à-vis the accounting principles employed for SEC Form 20-F reporting purposes. Results are consistent with a feedback process through which the new information disclosed by the SEC Form 20-F reporting requirements in the ADR market attenuates the price discovery process in the home country equity market when the difference in information environment quality is large.     

Do early and voluntary filers of financial information in XBRL format signal superior corporate governance and operating performance?

On March 16, 2005, the SEC issued Final Rule 33-8529 encouraging registrants to voluntarily file tagged financial statement information on the EDGAR reporting System using XBRL format. In this paper, we examine whether early and voluntary filers of financial information in XBRL format demonstrate superior corporate governance and operating performance relative to their non-adopting peers. We investigate performance, market, and structure-related firm variables. Our results suggest that corporate governance is significantly and positively associated with a firm's decision to be an early and voluntary filer of financial information in XBRL format. At the same time, firm performance factors including liquidity and firm size are also associated with the early and voluntary XBRL filing decision. Our findings should be particularly interesting for the SEC, as it considers the corporate governance and firm-performance related associations between certain registrants' early and voluntary response and its call for XBRL-based filings.     

Trust and Financial Reporting Quality

Using unique survey data from Great Place to Work® Institute, we investigate the association of intraorganizational trust (i.e., employees’ trust in management) with three aspects of financial reporting: accruals quality, misstatements, and internal control quality. We find that trust is associated with better accrual quality, lower likelihood of financial statement misstatements, and lower likelihood of internal control material weakness disclosures. However, these effects are not uniform across all companies. Consistent with trust improving financial reporting quality through improved information production and information sharing, we find that trust is significantly associated with financial reporting quality in relatively decentralized firms, but not in firms that are relatively centralized. Our results are robust to several analyses that attempt to control for potential alternative explanations.     

The Influence of Remuneration Structures on Financial Reporting Quality: Evidence from Australia

This cross‐sectional study investigates the influence of remuneration structures on financial reporting quality, based on a sample of companies listed on the Australian Securities Exchange (ASX). Compliance with Remuneration Principle eight issued by ASX (providing recommendations on formation, operation and disclosure of remuneration committees) is expected to improve financial reporting quality represented by a decreased level of earnings management. This study expands the corporate governance literature by examining an under‐researched mechanism to address the agency problem. Earnings management, as a consequence of the agency problem, is measured using the level of absolute discretionary accruals. In this study, we use the modified Jones model to measure the level of discretionary accruals and the existence of reduced earnings management. The study is conducted using a random sample of 214 firm‐year observations selected from the ASX listed companies. Our findings show a higher level of compliance with the principle on remuneration is associated with lower levels of earnings management. The findings support the efficient functioning of the ASX‐proposed remuneration structure in reducing earnings manipulations.     

财务报告质量评估的探讨

为了打击“数字游戏”和对付“盈利操纵” ,美国证券交易委员会原主席阿瑟·利维特 (ArthurLevitt)多次谈到高质量会计准则的重要性。什么是高质量会计准则的含义 ,或者说什么会计信息特征可以认为是对“使用者需要”和“股东 /投资人保护”有用的多层次的质量 ?本文试图审视一系列有关评估财务报告质量的不同方法 (模式或框架 ) ,包括 :美国财务会计准则委员会的概念框架、美国证券交易委员会用于评估国际会计准则质量的模式、关于改进公司审计委员会效率的“蓝带委员会”第 8号建议、美国第 6 1号审计准则公告、美国注册会计师协会的《改进企业报告———面向用户》的建议 ,特别是安达信会计师事务所合伙人Jonas&Blancher的建议框架 ;提出一份有关高质量财务报告的建议 ,重点关注透明度这一质量 ,并引用了Jonas&Blancher的“评估财务报告质量的问题”作为本文的一个附录。     

Effect of foreign GAAP earnings and Form 20-F reconciliations on revisions of analysts' forecasts

A controversial area of U.S. securities regulations involves the Securities and Exchange Commission's (SEC) financial reporting requirements for foreign firms, specifically, the necessity of providing a quantitative reconciliation to U.S. GAAP (Form 20-F). The results of earnings-returns research to date indicate that the release of foreign GAAP earnings provides important information. However, the results of earnings-returns studies using reconciled information are mixed. Instead of using an earnings-returns methodology adopted in prior research, this study utilizes analysts' revisions as a market indicator of the effect of information released in foreign GAAP earnings and the reconciled information in Form 20-F. Additionally, the study investigates the influence of four firm-specific variables in the firm's information environment—similarities of accounting systems, analyst following, difference between reconciled earnings and foreign GAAP earnings, and dispersion of analysts' expectations—on positive abnormal revision activities of financial analysts at the time of filing Form 20-F.The results indicate that the release of foreign GAAP earnings (at earnings announcement dates) and reconciled information (at the time of filing Form 20-F) contains relevant information as measured by analysts' revisions. Further, variables representing analyst following, change in reconciled earnings, and dispersion of analysts' expectations are significant in explaining the variation observed in positive abnormal revisions.     

The Timeliness of Restatement Disclosures and Financial Reporting Credibility

This study investigates whether prompt discovery and disclosure of earnings restatements is associated with greater post‐restatement financial reporting credibility. We measure the timeliness of restatement detection by the length of time between the end of the misstated period and the subsequent restatement announcement. We document that shorter detection periods are significantly associated with high‐quality corporate governance characteristics and executive and/or auditor turnover, but not with characteristics of restatements. We also find that firms with shorter detection periods exhibit a more moderate decline in the information content of earnings following restatement announcements relative to firms with longer detection periods, and that detection period length has an incremental effect on the information content of earnings relative to executive and/or auditor turnover alone. In addition, we find that restatement disclosures are more timely following the implementation of the SOX‐era reforms, and that only firms with shorter detection periods experience more moderate post‐restatement declines in the information content of earnings following the implementation of the SOX‐era reforms. The results from this study suggest that the timeliness of restatement detection and disclosure is associated with greater financial reporting credibility following restatements.     

Reporting accountant appointments and accounting restatements: Evidence from UK private companies

In recent years, regulators have exempted an increasing number of companies from the requirement to appoint auditors, yet little is known about the role of the accounting profession in preparing and validating the financial statements of unaudited companies. In this paper, we examine empirically the factors associated with the appointment of reporting accountants. We then provide novel evidence on whether unaudited UK small private companies are less likely to restate their annual accounts when they have been prepared by an external accountancy firm (i.e., a reporting accountant). Based on a cross sectional analysis of a large sample of small private unaudited UK companies, we find that, in accordance with the ‘confirmation hypothesis’, larger companies that voluntarily disclose more financial information are more likely to appoint a reporting accountant. We also find that the accounts of companies with a reporting accountant are significantly less likely to be restated than those without. This result is more pronounced for companies disclosing more financial information and for those employing a larger accounting firm. Given the dwindling number of private companies opting for audits, our findings contribute to debates on the role of the accounting profession in enhancing private company financial reporting quality.     

Founding Family Ownership and Earnings Quality

This study investigates the relation between founding family ownership and earnings quality using data from the Standard & Poor's 500 companies. Existing literature has documented that financial reporting is of higher quality when firms have stronger corporate governance mechanisms and when there is greater demand for quality financial reporting. I provide two competing theories of the effect of founding family ownership on the demand and supply of earnings quality: the entrenchment effect and the alignment effect. The empirical results show that, on average, founding family ownership is associated with higher earnings quality. In particular, I find consistent evidence that founding family ownership is associated with lower abnormal accruals, greater earnings informativeness, and less persistence of transitory loss components in earnings. In addition, the results suggest a nonlinear relation between family ownership and earnings quality.     

Effects of international institutional factors on earnings quality of banks

We examine the relation between legal, extra-legal and political institutional factors and earnings quality of banks across countries. We predict that earnings quality is higher in countries with legal, extra-legal and political systems that reduce the consumption of private control benefits by insiders and afford outside investors greater protection. Using a sample of banks from 35 countries during the pre-crisis period from 1993 to 2006, we find that all five measures of earnings quality studied are higher in countries with stronger legal, extra-legal and political institutional structures. We also find that banks in countries with stronger institutions are less likely to report losses, have lower loan loss provisions, and higher balance sheet strength during the 2007–2009 crisis period. Our findings highlight the implications of country level institutional factors for financial reporting quality and are relevant to bank regulators who are considering additional regulations on bank financial reporting.     

CFO Narcissism and Financial Reporting Quality

We investigate the effect of CFO narcissism, as measured by signature size, on financial reporting quality. Experimentally, we validate that narcissism predicts misreporting behavior, and that signature size predicts misreporting through its association with narcissism. Empirically, we examine notarized CFO signatures and find CFO narcissism is associated with more earnings management, less timely loss recognition, weaker internal control quality, and a higher probability of restatements. The results are consistent for within‐firm comparisons focusing on CFO changes and are robust to controlling for CFO overconfidence and CEO narcissism. The results highlight the importance of CFO characteristics in the domain of financial reporting decisions.     

Independent director cash compensation and earnings management

This study examines the impact of independent directors’ cash compensation on firms’ financial reporting quality using a sample of Chinese listed companies from 2002 to 2008. Unlike in the U.S. where most listed firms provide stock-related compensations to outside directors, Chinese listed companies compensate independent directors with cash only. This context offers a cleaner setting for examining the effects of independent director cash pay on earnings management. Our study documents a positive association between independent director cash compensation and the magnitude of earnings management. This suggests that compensating independent directors with higher cash pay compromises their independence and reduces their effectiveness in financial reporting oversight. Our results are robust to an array of sensitivity checks. These findings have important implications for both investors and policy makers by showing that independent directors’ cash compensation is also a significant determinant of financial reporting quality.