Corporate Lobbying and Firm Performance

Corporate lobbying activities are designed to influence legislators, regulators and courts, presumably to encourage favorable policies and/or outcomes. In dollar terms, corporate lobbying expenditures are typically one or even two orders of magnitude larger than spending by Political Action Committees (PAC), and, unlike PAC donations, lobbying amounts are direct corporate expenditures. We use data made available by the Lobbying Disclosure Act of 1995 to examine this more pervasive form of corporate political activity. We find that, on average, lobbying is positively related to accounting and market measures of financial performance. These results are robust across a number of empirical specifications. We also report market performance evidence using a portfolio approach. We find that portfolios of firms with the highest lobbying intensities significantly outperform their benchmarks in the three years following portfolio formation.     

经营风险与企业杠杆率

本文从理论和实证两方面考察企业经营风险将如何影响其杠杆率。其中,企业面临的经营风险被定义为在企业所属"年份×城市×二位行业"层面内除自身外其他所有企业资产收益率(ROA)的分布标准差。整体而言,当企业经营风险上升时,其投资和负债决策将更加保守,表现为资产负债表收缩和杠杆率下降。分债务期限来看,杠杆率的变化又可分为"规模效应"和"结构效应",前者指向投资、负债决策的整体收缩,后者指向债务结构中短期负债占比的下降。经营风险上升时,杠杆率下降主要体现为短期债务的缩减;分所有制来看,非国有企业对经营风险的敏感度较强,国有企业对经营风险的敏感度较小,这与两类企业的融资难易程度相符。     

我们为什么需要绿色金融?——从全球经验事实到基于经济增长框架的理论解释

当前,绿色金融备受关注,然而该领域的基础理论尚需进一步强化。根据经济学的一般原理,由于污染的外部性问题,环保的主要力量应当是公共部门而非金融系统。然而为何越来越多国家选择发展绿色金融?其背后的经济学原理是什么?深入探讨这些问题是有效制定政策、构建绿色金融理论体系的基础。本文基于跨国面板数据的分析表明,绿色金融对经济增长具有显著的促进效应,表现出与公共部门环保投入的显著差异。在此基础上,本文构建基于经济增长框架的绿色金融理论模型,对经验事实给出理论解释。模型证明:绿色金融的成本分摊与风险分担功能使其具有独特的长期增长效应,是经济发展必然选择;绿色金融政策与绿色财政政策的协调配合是实现高质量发展的有效手段。本文从理论层面回答了“为什么需要绿色金融”这一问题,为绿色金融的经济学理论发展和政策分析提供了可借鉴的框架。     

Short Selling and Firm Operating Performance

While it is well known that short selling predicts future negative stock price performance, it has not been established whether short selling predicts future negative operating performance. We find that firms in the top decile of increases in short interest (an increase of about four percentage points) experience a 21% subsequent decline in operating performance relative to matched control firms. The greater the increase in short interest, the larger the decline in operating performance. The results are robust to alternative performance measures and to sample splits based on firm size. These results suggest that short interest may reflect private information about firm fundamentals rather than other factors that may drive stock price changes.     

The Impact of AASB 8 Operating Segments on Analysts’ Earnings Forecasts: Australian Evidence

This paper evaluates the impact of firms’ adoption of AASB 8 segment disclosure rules on analysts’ earnings forecasts. It examines whether providing more disaggregated segment information following the adoption of AASB 8 is associated with an increase in analysts’ ability to forecast earnings. We find that analysts’ earnings forecasts have not improved significantly after adopting AASB 8 in Australia, regardless of whether firms disclosed more disaggregated segment information. Our use of control firms provides assurance that the results are due to AASB 8 and not to some other events concurrent with the adoption of AASB 8. Overall, our results imply that the benefits associated with the management approach as experienced by financial analysts in the United States have not been realised by financial analysts in Australia. This suggests that the successful adoption of an accounting standard in one country should not be the justification for recommending adoption in other countries. Further, our results raise questions about whether the enhanced disclosures required in the new standard are more for the other users of financial statements, such as investors, rather than analysts.     

International Diversification and Firm Value

In this paper the impact of multinationalism is examined using a valuation model incorporating geographically segmented accounting information. The results indicate that multinational companies are more highly valued than their domestic counterparts and that the valuation difference lies in all their operations and not just their foreign operations. The value advantage of MNCs appears too large to be realistically explained by cost of capital reductions and would support either that high value firms become multinationals, rather than MNCs gaining valuation benefits from foreign investments, or a pricing fad. Preliminary results support the latter explanation.     

The Effect Of International Acquisitions on Firm Leverage

To determine whether corporate international diversification leads firms to increase their leverage, we perform an event study that compares the leverage of corporations before and after they acquire foreign subsidiaries. We find that on average leverage increases from the first to the third year following the acquisition. When we examine the relation between additional debt financing after foreign acquisitions and the characteristics of these acquisitions, we find that in addition to such major determinants as size and profitability, debt financing is explained by geographical and industrial diversification effects.     

Lobbying of the International Accounting Standards Committee: The Case of Construction Contracts

Many cultural, political, economic and other environmental factors have been suggested as impediments to the efforts of the International Accounting Standards Committee (IASC) to harmonize international accounting standards. We investigate the relationship between lobbyists’ position, and: (1) their home countries’ financial accounting standards; and (2) their home countries’ tax rules. The factors are tested both separately and jointly to increase our understanding of lobbying and obstacles to harmonization. Long-term construction contracts are used as our case study. Construction contracts were traditionally accounted for by either the completed contract method (CCM) or the percentage of completion method (PCM). Originally, the IASC’s Standards (IASs) allowed both CCM and PCM. Thus, most countries’ accounting standards complied with IASs. However, the IASC’s Comparability Project, beginning with Exposure Draft (ED) 32, proposed to eliminate CCM. Thirty-nine comment letters submitted on ED 32 contained specific references to long-term construction contracts. Although almost 60% opposed the complete elimination of CCM, the IASC eliminated it. However, in many ways, the IASC co-opted lobbyists by allowing the Zero Profit Method, which may effectively result in the same timing of profit recognition as CCM. Support is found for a strong link between respondents’ lobbying position and both their home country’s accounting standards and tax laws. Each factor may hinder the harmonization process. A high positive correlation also exists between the accounting standards and tax laws of lobbyists’ countries. Beyond the possible importance of the tax and financial reporting linkage affecting harmonization, the issue of multicollinearity should signal caution when interpreting the results of lobbying studies that simultaneously include highly correlated variables in the same model.     

Lobbying and Uniform Disclosure Regulation

This study examines the costs and benefits of uniform accounting regulation in the presence of heterogeneous firms that can lobby the regulator. A commitment to uniform regulation reduces economic distortions caused by lobbying by creating a free‐rider problem between lobbying firms at the cost of forcing the same treatment on heterogeneous firms. Resolving this tradeoff, an institutional commitment to uniformity is socially desirable when firms are sufficiently homogeneous or the costs of lobbying to society are large. We show that the regulatory intensity for a given firm can be increasing or decreasing in the degree of uniformity, even though uniformity always reduces lobbying. Our analysis sheds light on the determinants of standard‐setting institutions and their effects on corporate governance and lobbying efforts.     

会计师事务所人力资本与薪资对其经营绩效之影响

知识经济时代,人力资本与薪酬诱因设计是影响会计师事务所经营绩效的关键因素。人力资本与薪酬诱因设计是否随着会计师事务所经营环境竞争日益激烈,而更有助于经营绩效的提高,目前仍缺乏相关证据。有鉴于此,本研究采用2004至2007年「会计师事务所服务业调查报告」之普查资料,探讨会计师事务所人力资本、薪资与经营绩效三者间之关联性。实证发现:实证结果显示,会计师事务所人力资本越高,则薪资水平越高;会计师事务所薪资水平越高,则经营绩效越好;会计师事务所人力资本越高,则经营绩效越好;员工薪资在人力资本与经营绩效间之间扮演着中介之角色。在审计市场环境日益艰困情况下,研究结果可提供会计师事务所的经营者在决策时一个有用之参考。     

Determinants and Effects of Corporate Lobbying

We examine the determinants and value effects of corporate lobbying, controlling for corporate political action committee (PAC) campaign contributions. We find evidence that firms with greater potential payoffs from favorable policy and regulations lobby most actively, and that managers often utilize both lobbying and campaign contribution channels to influence the political climate affecting the firm. We also find that shareholders value the lobbying activities pursued by management on their behalf, particularly if the firm does not have a PAC that contributed to an election campaign. The results are robust to a number of tests designed to mitigate potential omitted‐variable and self‐selection bias.     

Nonprofit Lobbying: Museums and Collections Capitalization

This research examines the museum characteristics associated with lobbying on the 1990 FASB Exposure Draft (FASB, 1990) that would have required US museums to capitalize their collections. A sample of 103 museums that lobbied on the Exposure Draft is compared to a matched sample of museums that did not choose to lobby. The results reveal that museums which lobbied are larger, older, and members of or accredited by the American Association of Museums. Also, proportionately more private museums and art museums than exist in the overall US museum population chose to lobby on the proposed requirement.     

Lobbying and Audit Regulation in the EU

In this paper, we analyze comment letters submitted in response to the European Commission (EC) Green Paper on audit policy. We find that consistent with the theory of incentives and the presence of information asymmetries between rule-making bodies and interest groups, the highest participation within the consultation process came from auditors and preparers of financial statements. Additionally, our results suggest that these interest groups exhibit different strategic lobbying behaviors in terms of employing more self-referential arguments than other interest groups. Moreover, we provide evidence that self-referential argumentation strategies are more influential when expressing opposing views, whereas conceptually based argumentation strategies are more influential when expressing supporting views. We contribute to a more detailed understanding of the role that lobbyists and argumentation strategies played in the recent EU audit policy reform, and we infer that lobbying activities might have led the EC to moderate its proposals to obtain interest groups’ support.     

Post-Implementation Reviews for IASB and FASB Standards: A Comparison of the Process and Findings for the Operating Segments Standards

Abstract

The International Accounting Standards Board (IASB) and the Financial Accounting Foundation (FAF) have recently completed post-implementation reviews (PIRs) for their converged standards on operating segments IFRS 8 and SFAS 131. The two accounting bodies use PIRs as an additional standard assessment mechanism. This paper (1) provides an overview of the main differences and similarities between the two PIR processes and (2) compares the findings of the PIRs on the operating segment standards supplemented with insights from a survey of the segment information notes of a sample of STOXX Europe 600 companies. The IASB and the FAF set the specific PIR objectives and conduct the information gathering phase differently. For the IFRS 8 and SFAS 131 PIRs, these differences meant that the FAF focused more narrowly on how SFAS 131 performs compared to the previous standard, while the IASB is aimed to more broadly assess constituents' views on whether IFRS 8 works well in practice. Comparing the PIR findings for the operating segments standards is warranted given that the standards are converged and that the standard setters re-expressed their commitment to keep them substantially converged. Uniform PIR processes could have eased the cooperation in maintaining convergence. Given the different scope of the reviews, standard setters will need to find a common ground on how to proceed and which issues to address further.     

Corporate Lobbying,Visibility and Accounting Conservatism

In this study, we examine the relationship between a firm's lobbying activities and financial reporting quality using a US setting where public scrutiny of corporate political activities is high. More importantly, we examine whether and how a firm's visibility shapes the relationship between its corporate lobbying activities and accounting conservatism. Adopting annual lobbying expenditure data to measure firms’ lobbying activities, and using a propensity‐score‐matching methodology to control for differences in firm characteristics between lobbying and non‐lobbying firms, we find a positive relationship between a firm's lobbying intensity and the degree of accounting conservatism in its financial reporting. We further find this positive relationship to be more pronounced in lobbying firms with a higher level of visibility. These results are robust after controlling for a firm's political connections, across various conditional conservatism measures, and across a number of visibility measures including firm size, the number of analysts following the firm, the age of the firm, the number of foreign stock exchanges that the firm is cross‐listed in, and the level of the firm's media coverage. Together, our findings add to the literature on how firms’ political activities shape their accounting practices in general, and accounting conservatism in particular. More importantly, our findings suggest that the heightened public attention paid to political activities in the US yields incentives for firms to be more conservative in their accounting practices.     

Does Weak Governance Cause Weak Stock Returns? An Examination of Firm Operating Performance and Investors' Expectations

We investigate Gompers, Ishii, and Metrick's (2003) finding that firms with weak shareholder rights exhibit significant stock market underperformance. If the relation between poor governance and poor returns is causal, we expect that the market is negatively surprised by the poor operating performance of weak governance firms. We find that firms with weak shareholder rights exhibit significant operating underperformance. However, analysts' forecast errors and earnings announcement returns show no evidence that this underperformance surprises the market. Our results are robust to controls for takeover activity. Overall, our results do not support the hypothesis that weak governance causes poor stock returns.     

Lobbying for size and slice of the quota

International Tax and Public Finance - The formation and allocation of an emission quota are analyzed in a common agency framework with two stages. First, the principals lobby for the size of the...     

Division Manager Lobbying Power and the Allocation of Capital

We investigate whether division manager lobbying power affects the allocation of capital in multi-divisional firms. We find that firm-level disparities in division manager lobbying power (measured by tenure, time-in-position, board membership, and top executive status) affect capital allocation in expected ways. Managers with greater relative lobbying power compete for capital expenditures from a position of strength. Evidence is also provided which suggests that division manager ownership mitigates lobbying efforts. Furthermore, disparity in division manager lobbying power is associated with lower firm excess value. These results support the view that division manager influence activities impact the operation of internal capital markets.