Analysts’ Use of Nonfinancial Information Disclosures*

In this study I examine how analysts process nonfinancial information and how this is affected by the patterns of firms’ nonfinancial information disclosures. More specifically, I examine the association between analyst earnings forecast errors and the persistence of nonfinancial disclosures, both across information content and over time. The study focuses on firms in the wireless industry for the period 1997–2007. The results show that analysts tend to underreact to the information contained in customer acquisition cost, average revenue per user, and the number of subscribers. These are the performance measures that have significant predictive ability for future earnings of wireless firms. Distinguishing between firms on the basis of their nonfinancial disclosure patterns reveals that the above findings are driven primarily by firms with irregular disclosures. There is no evidence of analysts’ inefficiency in evaluating the content of nonfinancial metrics provided by persistently disclosing firms. This implies that the lack of systematic disclosures of performance measures restricts financial analysts’ ability to fully analyze the contributions of these metrics for future earnings.     

Spillover Effects of Internal Control Weakness Disclosures: The Role of Audit Committees and Board Connections

We find that firms are less likely to report an internal control material weakness (as mandated by the Sarbanes‐Oxley Act) in a given year if one of their audit committee members is concurrently on the board of a firm that disclosed a material weakness within the prior three years. We find a similar spillover effect for financial restatement disclosures. The spillover from material weakness disclosures is evident only if a shared director has more experience with the disclosing firm or can channel more information about the disclosed material weakness. Our findings suggest that prior director experiences outside the firm influence the work of audit committees inside the firm. One rationale is that a director's prior experience with an adverse disclosure helps diffuse important insights and serves as a catalyst for improvements in a firm's internal control and financial reporting practices. An alternative explanation, which we cannot dismiss, holds that a director's prior experience helps a firm to underreport material weaknesses and financial restatements without any attendant improvements in the underlying practices.     

Firm Productivity,Innovation, and Financial Development

How do firm‐specific actions—in particular, innovation—affect firm productivity? What is the role of the financial sector in facilitating higher productivity? Using a rich firm‐level data set, we find that innovation is crucial for firm performance as it directly and measurably increases productivity. The impact of innovation on productivity is larger in less‐developed countries. Evidence of financial sector development influencing the innovation‐productivity link is weak, but the effect is difficult to identify due to correlation between indicators of a country's financial and nonfinancial development. Furthermore, we find evidence that the innovation effect on productivity is more significant for high‐tech firms than for low‐tech firms.     

金融危机后国际公司治理改革的动向及启示

公司治理的失效是导致金融危机的原因之一。国际社会在金融危机后的公司治理改革,重点应放在提高董事会的责任、加强风险控制和改善薪酬制度等方面。从近年来公司治理改革的发展趋势看,维护监管与灵活性的平衡已经成为新一轮公司治理改革的出发点。越来越多的国家实行公司治理规范的"服从或解释"规则。在给予公司充分的治理选择权的条件下,通过提高透明度,加强市场约束和问责性。     

The Forewarning Effect of Critical Audit Matter Disclosures Involving Measurement Uncertainty*

We present experimental evidence suggesting that critical audit matter (CAM) disclosures in the auditor's report involving areas of high measurement uncertainty forewarn users of misstatement risk. Specifically, in our first study with MBA students, financial analysts, and attorneys, we find that CAMs (i) lower premisstatement assessments of confidence in the financial statement area disclosed as a CAM, and (ii) lower assessments of auditor responsibility for a subsequently revealed misstatement in a CAM-related area. In our second study with student participants proxying as mock jurors, we find that the responsibility-mitigating effect of CAM disclosure is driven by CAM disclosures involving measurement uncertainty, as opposed to CAM disclosures involving categorical determinations. Combined, our findings help reconcile mixed evidence from prior research, supporting the view that the forewarning effect of CAM disclosures involving measurement uncertainty could mitigate perceived auditor responsibility for CAM-related material misstatements.     

Rhetoric versus Reality: The Best and Worst of Aid Agency Practices

Foreign aid critics, supporters, recipients, and donors have produced eloquent rhetoric on the need for better aid practices—has this translated into reality? This paper attempts to monitor the best and worst of aid practices among bilateral, multilateral, and UN agencies. We create aid practice measures based on aid transparency, specialization, selectivity, ineffective aid channels, and overhead costs. We rate donor agencies from best to worst on aid practices. We find that the UK does well among bilateral agencies, the US is below average, and Scandinavian donors do surprisingly poorly. The biggest difference is between the UN agencies, who mostly rank in the bottom half of donors, and everyone else. Average performance of all agencies on transparency, fragmentation, and selectivity is still very poor. The paper also assesses trends in best practices over time—we find modest improvement in transparency and more in moving away from ineffective channels. However, we find no evidence of improvements (and partial evidence of worsening) in specialization, fragmentation, and selectivity, despite escalating rhetoric to the contrary.     

Directors' Informational Role in Corporate Voluntary Disclosure: An Analysis of Directors from Related Industries

Boards of directors play their role in corporate governance by advising and/or monitoring managers. In the corporate disclosure literature, prior research has documented directors' monitoring role, yet empirical evidence on directors' advising role is limited. Since the advising role often entails information transfer, we examine directors who concurrently serve as directors or executives in the firms' related industries (DRIs) and hence possess valuable information about the firms' external operating environment. We hypothesize and find that more DRIs on boards are associated with more accurate management forecasts. This association is stronger when firms face greater uncertainty, and holds in settings where DRIs are unlikely to monitor managers, suggesting a distinct advising role of DRIs. Our study highlights directors' role as information suppliers and advisors who help shape corporate voluntary disclosure.     

Evaluation of board reforms: An examination of the appointment of outside directors

Existing literature on the evaluation of the economic consequences of board reforms has some limitations including: their estimation results fail to show the causal effects of the regulatory reforms; they have limited policy implications for an economy where family businesses are dominant; and there is a lack of consensus on the impacts of the reforms.Using a unique dataset and program evaluation methodologies, this paper investigated the performance of share prices in response to the newly introduced outside director system in Korea, where family businesses have been dominant. First, we find that the positive impact of the appointment of outside directors on returns is observed only when the proportion of outsiders on a board increases significantly and their appointment is accompanied by the lead-and-lag effect of regulatory reforms. Second, the buy-and-hold abnormal return is more evident for independent firms than for chaebol affiliates, due partly to the high monitoring costs for cross-shareholdings among affiliates.     

State‐owned Enterprises: NWSC's Turnaround in Uganda

Abstract: Oversight agencies in the water sector emphasize performance monitoring based on outputs, such as customers served, volume delivered, and service quality. However, bureaucratic tendencies can curtail operational innovation and creativity. In situations where managers lack full operating knowledge and capacities, proactive and consultative monitoring and regulation can yield benefits. This study reviews the results of Uganda's National Water and Sewerage Corporation's (NWSC) approach to performance monitoring (and ‘self‐regulation’). The purpose of this study is to outline corrective actions undertaken by the NWSC Management and Staff to turn around performance, the sequencing of those steps, and the outcomes from this reform program. The NWSC focuses on promoting improvements in technical processes and input selection. Improvements in service quality and network expansion resulted from aligning performance improvement initiatives with the organization's financial performance and team development. The program's success required managing organizational rigidities and moving towards full cost‐recovery. In particular, organizational incentives and information flows encouraged managers to reduce rules and procedures that hindered strong performance. African proverbs are interspersed throughout the article to underscore key themes and lessons for those designing, implementing, and evaluating infrastructure sector reform initiatives.     

The Nominating Committee Process: A Qualitative Examination of Board Independence and Formalization

The nominating committee (NC) of the board identifies and nominates individuals for board service, thus establishing the board's composition. Despite this important role, relatively little is known about the NC process, including NC members' actions and thought processes. Based on interviews of 20 U.S. public company NC members, including 16 chairs, we focus on two primary questions: (1) what is the extent of influence that the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) has over committee processes, and (2) to what extent are committee processes formalized (i.e., framed and acted upon in a mechanistic way)? We find that there is continuing recognition of CEO influence in the director nomination process, the level of which varies widely by company. Also, there is considerable variability in the formalization of the director nomination process (e.g., some NCs use search firms and a matrix/grid approach to assessing director skill sets across the board, while others do not). Finally, we find that many interviewees have professional or personal ties to the CEO and that nearly all of the NCs focus on “chemistry” and comfort in the director nomination process, where the often‐stated goal is to enhance the board's ability to function effectively and to reduce risk in the director nomination process. The overall message of the interviews perhaps is best captured by one interviewee, who described a “strange little dance.” Throughout the interviews, we find evidence that the NC must “dance” through a complex decision landscape.     

Financial Accounting Effects of Tax Aggressiveness: Contracting and Measurement

This study examines a setting in which a tax‐reporting decision is delegated to a firm's tax manager. Using financial accounting measures of tax expense to evaluate the tax manager allows the firm to efficiently attain the level of tax avoidance it prefers, despite the fact that the consequences of the tax‐reporting decision will occur in the future. The study also examines how well two accounting measures of tax aggressiveness — cash taxes paid and the unrecognized tax benefit — distinguish between conservative and aggressive firms.     

Monitoring in Multiagent Organizations*

This paper studies how to assign “monitors” to productive agents in order to generate signals about the agents' performance that are most useful from a contracting perspective. We show that if signals generated by the same monitor are negatively (positively) correlated, then the optimal monitoring assignment will be “focused” (“dispersed”). This holds because dispersed monitoring allows the firm to better utilize relative performance evaluation. On the other hand, if each monitor communicates only an aggregated signal to the principal, then focused monitoring is always optimal since aggregation undermines relative performance evaluation. We also study team‐based compensation and randomized monitoring assignments. In particular, we show that the firm can gain from randomizing the monitoring assignment, compared with the optimal linear deterministic contract. Furthermore, under randomization, the conditional expected utility for the agent is higher when the agent is not monitored compared with the case where the agent is monitored. That is, the chance of being monitored serves as a “stick” rather than a “carrot”.     

The Influence of Corporate Social Responsibility Measures on Investors' Judgments when Integrated in a Financial Report versus Presented in a Separate Report

This study examines the effect on investors' judgments of corporate social responsibility (CSR) measures when integrated with financial information in a single report versus when presented in a separate CSR report. Advocates for integrated reports argue that CSR information will be perceived as more relevant and have a greater impact on users when observed in an integrated report. However, we provide experimental evidence that CSR measures have greater influence on investors' judgments when investors observe the CSR information and financial information depicted in separate reports. We also provide evidence that this greater influence of CSR measures is caused by investors' evaluations taking on a “multidimensional perspective” that includes both a social responsibility and a financial dimension, which is triggered by observing the separate CSR report. Activating a social responsibility dimension elevates the perceived relevance of CSR measures, increasing their influence on investors' judgments. Our study contributes to practice by highlighting a potential unintended consequence of issuing integrated versus separate CSR reports: that investors incorporate CSR information less when it is integrated with financial information versus separately reported.     

Do Mutual Fund Investors Care About Auditor Quality?

We study the influence of perceived auditor quality on investment decisions by bond mutual fund investors. Audits of bond mutual funds require significant auditor expertise. Fund managers estimate daily the fair market values of holdings that are often opaque and illiquid. Managers can use their discretion to manipulate their fund's performance results. While it is known that investment flows into funds that report good past performance, little evidence exists about whether investors' confidence in the reliability of fund financial reports is influenced by auditor quality. Using hand‐collected data from SEC filings, we find that the positive association between reported performance and investment flows is stronger for funds with auditors who are industry specialists and are longer‐tenured, as well as for funds that pay higher audit fees. We do not find that auditor office size strengthens the association. We also find that the presence of industry‐specialist auditors, long‐tenured auditors, and higher audit fees lead to additional disclosure in the form of emphasis‐of‐matter. This study contributes to the streams of research investigating perceived audit quality, fund investment decisions, and auditing for financial services.     

EBITDA and Managers' Investment and Leverage Choices

EBITDA is a commonly used performance measure for (i) valuation, (ii) debt contracting, and (iii) executive compensation. The widespread use of EBITDA by stakeholders may induce managers to focus their attention on EBITDA. Since EBITDA excludes various expenses, managers who fixate on EBITDA may underweight the excluded expenses when determining their firms' investments in capital and leverage levels. I find that managers who fixate on EBITDA overinvest in capital and overlever their firm relative to their industry peers. These results are robust to alternative proxies for managers' focus on EBITDA and alternative specifications. I also find that firms whose managers focus on EBITDA have weaker operating performance, which is attributed to higher depreciation expense. My primary proxy for managers' focus on EBITDA is whether they choose to disclose EBITDA in annual earnings announcements. I find that the use of EBITDA in setting executive compensation, the prevalence of EBITDA estimates by analysts, and the use of EBITDA‐based covenants in firms' debt contracts are all positively associated with the propensity to disclose EBITDA in earnings announcements. I find weaker evidence of opportunistic motives explaining EBITDA disclosure. These results are consistent with managers disclosing EBITDA to portray to investors that it is a metric they seek to maximize. Overall, this study suggests that while EBITDA is a widely used metric, there is a systematic cost to using this measure—it provides managers with incentives to overinvest in capital and to acquire excessive debt.     

股份制商业银行治理:基于年报的实证分析

采用2001-2003年间11家商业银行的19个年报样本为依据,对我国股份制商业银行的治理机制及其与银行绩效的关系进行实证分析,发现样本银行股权结构并没有对银行绩效产生影响,董事会规模和高管人员薪酬激励对银行绩效有积极的作用,而独立董事比例和董事会会议次数却对银行绩效产生了负面影响;此外银行规模也是提升银行绩效的重要因素。     

基于三阶段DEA的河北省财政科技投入绩效评价文献综述

近年来,财政科技投入在促进国家科研创新、引导社会资本流动和加快经济高质量发展等方面承担了关键角色,因此,对财政科技投入绩效进行相关评价具有重要意义.从财政科技投入与经济增长与企业研发投入的关系、财政科技投入绩效评价的方法、DEA模型下的投入产出指标的选取,以及河北省财政科技投入绩效评价现状4个方面系统梳理科技投入绩效评价的相关文献.指出了未来研究需进一步关注的焦点.     

Chief Financial Officers as Inside Directors

Considerable prior research investigates whether the extent of insider presence on corporate boards is detrimental. However, the majority of past research treats all inside directors as a homogenous group. This study considers that issue in the context of chief financial officers (CFO) serving on their own company's board. Our research is important because individuals in different executive roles bring different skills and knowledge to board interactions, highlighting the potential for differential contributions. As prior research does not specifically distinguish CFOs from other board insiders, the potential benefits of knowledge sharing due to increased communication with other board members may have been masked. Specifically, the CFO is directly responsible for the quality of the financial reporting process and can therefore be associated with specific outcome measures. Our results show that the percentage of CFOs serving on their own boards is not large, likely due to the perspective (consistent with agency theory and reflected in independence guidelines) that company insiders on boards could promote their own best interest at the expense of shareholders. Contrary to this perception, we find that companies whose CFO has a seat on the board are associated with higher financial reporting quality (i.e., a lower likelihood of reporting a material weaknesses in internal controls or having a financial restatement, and better accruals quality). Yet, we also find potential drawbacks in that CFOs with a board seat tend to have higher excess compensation and lower likelihood of termination following poor performance, signaling greater entrenchment. While our results provide information to companies considering appointing the CFO to the board, both costs and benefits are demonstrated, and thus we conclude that each board should consider this decision based on its own circumstances and composition.     

Office Size of Big 4 Auditors and Client Restatements

Francis and Yu (2009) and Choi, Kim, Kim, and Zang (2010) report evidence that Big 4 audits are of higher quality when the engagement office is of larger size. Specifically, client earnings quality is higher and auditors in larger offices are more likely to issue going‐concern audit reports. We extend this line of research to test if larger Big 4 offices have fewer client restatements. A client restatement provides more direct evidence of a low‐quality audit than earnings quality metrics or going‐concern reports, because a restatement indicates the client's auditor did not effectively enforce the correct application of GAAP at the time the original financial statements were issued. We analyze 2,557 firm‐year restatements in a sample of 23,190 financial statements originally issued by U.S. firms from 2003 to 2008. We find that Big 4 office size is associated with fewer client restatements after controlling for innate client characteristics that may affect restatements (client size, financial performance, industry membership, nonfinancial measures, off‐balance sheet activities, and market‐related measures), and a set of controls for other auditor factors such as fees and industry expertise. The study raises important questions about the ability of smaller offices to deliver high‐quality audits for SEC registrants.     

Looking good by doing good: CEO attractiveness and corporate philanthropy

We investigate the effect of male corporate managers' physical appearance—classified into unattractive, average-looking, and attractive—on the philanthropic decisions of Chinese listed firms. We find that compared to average-looking managers, those who rated as attractive do not engage more actively in corporate donations. On the contrary, the probability of donating is approximately 5% higher for unattractive managers than for average-looking managers; further, unattractive managers donate 95% more in charitable giving. To explain these findings, we propose a psychological channel through which physical appearance may influence male managers' charitable donations: Because altruistic behaviors may aggrandize individuals, managers conscious of deficits in their own physical attractiveness may engage in prosocial behavior to increase their attractiveness in the eyes of others. We find consistent evidence that the effect of managers' unattractiveness on philanthropic decisions is stronger in firms with weaker corporate governance; further, we find that the positive impact of corporate donation on financial performance observed in firms led by attractive and average-looking managers is substantially weaker in those firms led by unattractive managers.