Opaque auditor dismissal disclosures: What does timing reveal that disclosures do not?

Auditor resignations provide a clear signal of accounting problems or heightened audit risk; however, registrants label the vast majority of auditor changes as dismissals, which carry more ambiguity. Motivated by the opacity of current dismissal disclosures, this study explores the usefulness of these disclosures compared to an alternative signal – the timing of the dismissal within the reporting year – for inferring the causes and implications of dismissals. Dividing the reporting year into key periods, we find that the probabilities of future restatements, material weaknesses, and delistings following a dismissal generally increase within the reporting year while negative circumstances disclosed do not. Analyses suggest that the timing patterns are caused by burgeoning, yet undisclosed, conflicts between the client and the outgoing auditor, rather than by transition difficulties involving the new auditor (as prior literature claims). The timing patterns strongly persist after controlling for negative circumstances that registrants disclose in the dismissal filing, suggesting that the disclosures are not fully revealing. In fact, disclosed negative circumstances have no incremental predictive power for future restatements and delistings. Our results suggest a severe lack of informativeness of current disclosures and support previous calls for improvement of dismissal disclosure regulation.     

Going-concern initial public offerings

We study the relation between audit reports and the capital-raising activities of small business by studying the role of going-concern (GC) audit opinions in IPOs. After controlling for other effects, we find that the presence of a GC opinion is positively related to whether a stock delists (for deleterious reasons) within two years of IPO. We also find that GC IPOs suffer less first-day underpricing. Based on Rock (1986), this implies that firms with GCs have less ex ante uncertainty in the sense that the information conveyed by a GC helps uninformed investors estimate the dispersion of secondary market values.     

中国境外上市公司的退市分析——基于阿里巴巴退市案例分析

继中出国企业掀起海外上市风潮以来,2011年开始出现了一轮争相退出海外的新浪潮。那么究竟是什么原因使得众多的中国境外上市公司摈弃上市公司这一荣誉头衔呢？本文以阿里巴巴网络有限公司退市为例进行解读,并从中得到启示。     

中美金融摩擦： 中国企业在美“被退市”风险的实与虚

近期，有新闻报道爆出特朗普政府正在考虑将中国公司从美国股市中摘牌，中概股应声下跌，引发股市震荡。随后美财政部虽对该消息进行了否定，但在中美贸易争端前景不明的形势下，不能完全排除美政府日后强迫中国企业退市、在金融领域升级紧张局势的可能性。本文回顾总结了中国企业在美股市场的发展历程与现状，从依据美国主要交易所退市规则与依据美国金融制裁法律框架两类常规与特殊途径出发，推测特朗普政府可能采取的制裁措施与情景，分析中概股退市后出路，为我国制定后续应对政策提出建议。     

Delisted versus voluntary delisted versus remain listed: financial disclosure timing

We focus in the period of announcement of accounting information for companies listed in an organized market and we re-examine their probability of delisting, voluntarily or not. Adopting the same framework, consideration is given to the assumption that investors utilize market information when accounting data are published. The analysis provided indicates that investors should pay attention to the financial disclosure timing. Our investigation demonstrated that even the short period of three months is quite important to making investment decisions.