THE EFFECT OF CEO TENURE ON THE RELATION BETWEEN FIRM PERFORMANCE AND TURNOVER

We analyze the effect of CEO tenure on the relation between firm performance and forced turnover. We find that the performance‐forced turnover relation is conditional on CEO tenure. Our results suggest a constant negative relation between firm performance and forced turnover throughout an inside CEO's tenure. Founders are entrenched early in their careers but held accountable for firm performance later in their careers. We find evidence that outside hires experience a probationary period, followed by a period of apparent entrenchment during their intermediate years that weakens later in their tenure. JEL classification: G34, J63.     

CEOs' general managerial skills and corporate risk taking subject to the moderator of CEO tenure

In this study, we examine the relation between chief executive officers' (CEOs') general managerial skills and firms' risk-taking behaviour. We find that generalist CEOs are associated with significantly higher firm risk, with the association decreasing significantly with CEO tenure. We propose the following managerial skills transformation explanation: the longer a CEO stays with a firm, the less general and more firm specific the CEO's skills and knowledge become; therefore, any effect of the CEO's general managerial skills only appears in the early years of tenure.     

Large investors’ portfolio composition and firms value

We analyze new Swedish data on the portfolio holdings of large blockholders and find that firm value increases with the weight of a stock in a large blockholder's portfolio. In our sample, this weight may be greater than 50%. We are the first to show that this value premium is correlated with portfolio weights for any large blockholders, not just institutions. We find some evidence that indicates that “stock importance” (high portfolio weight) can mitigate the negative effects of a dual-class structure on firm value. Further, it does not seem that a large blockholder's tenure as a CEO or as a board chairman affects this value premium. We conduct a variety of tests to rule out endogeneity and reverse causality.     

A Reexamination of the Tradeoff between the Future Benefit and Riskiness of R&D Increases

Many previous studies document a positive relation between research and development (R&D) and equity value. Though R&D can increase equity value by increasing firm value, it can also increase equity value at the expense of bondholder wealth through an increase in firm risk because equity is analogous to a call option on the underlying firm value. Shi [2003] tests this hypothesis by examining the relation between a firm's R&D intensity and its bond ratings and risk premiums at issuance. His results show that the net effect of R&D is negative for bondholders. We reexamine Shi's [2003] findings and in so doing make three contributions to the literature. First, we find that Shi's [2003] results are sensitive to the method of measuring R&D intensity. When we use what we argue is a better measure of R&D intensity, we find that the net effect of R&D is positive for bondholders. Second, when we use tests that Shi [2003] recognizes are even better than the ones that he uses, we find even stronger evidence of the positive effect of R&D on bondholders. Third, we examine cross‐sectional differences in the effect of R&D on debtholders. Consistent with our main finding, we document a negative relation between R&D increases and default risk. The default risk reduction is also more pronounced for firms with higher initial default scores (where the debtholders have more to gain from an R&D increase) and for firms with more bank debt (where the debtholders have greater covenant protection from the possible detriments associated with R&D increases).     

Audit Firm Tenure,Non‐Audit Services,and Internal Assessments of Audit Quality

We use data from internal assessments of audit quality in a Big 4 firm to investigate the impact of audit firm tenure and auditor‐provided non‐audit services (NAS) on audit quality. We find that first‐year audits receive lower assessments of audit quality and that quality improves shortly thereafter and then declines as tenure becomes very long. Partitioning our sample between SEC registrants and private clients, we find that the decline in audit quality in the long tenure range is attributable to audits of private clients. For audits of SEC registrants, the probability of a high quality audit reaches its maximum with very long tenure. We also find that audit fees are discounted for first‐year audits but auditor effort is higher than in subsequent years. We find no association, on average, between total NAS fees and audit quality in the full sample but observe that total NAS fees are positively associated with quality for SEC registrants and negatively associated with quality for privately held clients. Our findings are important for regulatory policies related to audit firm tenure and auditor‐provided NAS.     

Termination risk and managerial risk taking

We test the hypothesis that managers who face a high termination risk make less risky investments than the managers who face a low termination risk. A 10% increase in our measure of termination risk is associated with a 5%–23% decline in stock returns volatility for the median firm in our sample. We also find that for CEOs who are more likely to be fired in the event of investment failure, the inhibiting effect of termination risk appears to offset the positive effect of convexity of managerial compensation on managerial risk taking. These results are robust to alternative definitions of forced turnover and various measures of firm performances.     

The effects of disclosing critical audit matters and auditor tenure on nonprofessional investors’ judgments

In an effort to provide more meaningful information to financial statement users, the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (PCAOB) recently adopted sweeping changes to the audit report, requiring the audit firm to disclose whether or not it identified a critical audit matter (CAM) and its tenure with the client. To our knowledge, ours is the first study to explore how nonprofessional investors’ judgments are influenced by (1) the relative effects of a CAM disclosure versus a disclosure that the auditor did not identify a CAM, and (2) the disclosure of the audit firm’s tenure. We find that, relative to disclosing that no CAMs were identified, disclosing a CAM reduces investment intentions. We do not find a significant effect of tenure disclosure on investment intentions, despite evidence that participants attended to and understood the tenure manipulation. Concerning investors’ cognitive processes, we find that perceptions of both risk of material misstatement and management disclosure credibility mediate the effect of CAM disclosure on investment intentions, while perceived audit quality suppresses this effect. Our contributions include furthering the understanding of cognitive mechanisms through which CAM disclosure influences investment intentions, identifying a relatively unique setting in which perceptions of management disclosure credibility and audit quality move in opposite directions, and providing evidence that auditor tenure disclosure does not appear to affect investment intentions. Our findings should be of interest to regulators, auditors, issuers, and investors.     

Audit committees’ oversight of bank risk-taking

This study examines whether audit committee effectiveness affects bank risk-taking and risk management effectiveness. We find that banks with long board tenure audit committees have lower total risk and idiosyncratic risk, and banks with busy directors on their audit committees have higher total risk and idiosyncratic risk. These suggest that high audit committee effectiveness may constrain bank risk-taking activities. We also find that firm performance is more positively associated with bank risk for banks with long board tenure, more female audit committee members, or large size audit committees than for other banks, consistent with the notion that audit committee effectiveness may increase risk management effectiveness. However, this finding should be interpreted cautiously as it is contrary to the results on audit committee busyness.     

On the Relationship between Audit Tenure and Fees Paid to the Audit Firm and Audit Quality

Abstract

We investigate the impact of audit firm tenure, partner tenure, audit fees, fees for non-audit services and total fees on audit quality, as measured by discretionary accruals. Our sample consists of Spanish non-financial public companies for the years between 2006 and 2013. Results indicate that audit quality increases with audit firm tenure but decreases with partner tenure. Moreover, the level of fees paid to the audit firm seems to have a negative impact on audit quality, which is mainly driven by fees for audit services. In this regard, we do not observe any significant relationship between fees for non-audit services and audit quality. Our results also show that the negative relationship between either long partner tenures or high fees and audit quality does not occur when the tenure with the audit firm is long. Therefore, long audit firm tenures do not only seem to involve higher audit quality ‘per se’, but also moderate the negative effects of partner tenure and audit fees on audit quality. The results of this study, which are robust to several sensitivity checks, may be relevant for the current debate on auditor rotation and the joint provision of audit and non-audit services.     

CEO tenure and the performance-turnover relation

In a broad cross-section of US firms, we document that the likelihood of a CEO’s performance-related dismissal declines in his tenure. This finding is consistent with both firm performance revealing information about a CEO’s uncertain executive ability and CEO tenure reflecting weak firm governance choices that reduce the likelihood of performance-related dismissal. In a sample of CEOs who begin their appointment during our sample period, we find evidence more broadly in favor of the former explanation. Specifically, we find that (1) CEO survival is associated with superior firm performance, (2) this relation is unaffected by firm governance choices, (3) the intensity with which a firm monitors its CEO declines over his tenure, and (4) firms’ monitoring intensity increases following CEO turnover. Collectively, our results suggest that periodic performance reports increasingly resolve uncertainty regarding executive ability, thereby lowering firm owners’ demand for monitoring their CEO over his tenure.     

Effects of audit partners on clients’ business risk disclosure

We empirically investigate audit engagement partners’ involvement in business risk disclosure. Specifically, we examine whether the quality of business risk disclosure is influenced by engagement partner tenure and knowledge. We also examine whether the effects of partner tenure and knowledge are similar for Big 4 audit firms and non-Big 4 firms. Since fiscal year 2003, listed companies in Japan have been required to disclose business risk information. Although the business risk information is not audited, auditors concerned about their audit quality may seek to influence clients’ business risk disclosure practices. Giving advice to management on the narrative business risk disclosure can contribute to improving the perceived value of the auditor’s services which can be a competitive advantage. Using a sample of Japanese listed companies from 2003 to 2010, we find that if the engagement partners’ tenure is shorter, a company discloses more business risk information and the disclosure is more detailed. Furthermore, companies with audit partners who have a larger number of client engagements disclose larger amounts of business risk information in more detail. However, the engagement partner effects are mitigated if they belong to a Big 4 firm.     

The Value of Enterprise Risk Management

Enterprise risk management (ERM) has been the topic of increased media attention in recent years. The objective of this study is to measure the extent to which specific firms have implemented ERM programs and, then, to assess the value implications of these programs. We focus our attention in this study on U.S. insurers in order to control for differences that might arise from regulatory and market differences across industries. We simultaneously model the determinants of ERM and the effect of ERM on firm value. We estimate the effect of ERM on Tobin's Q, a standard proxy for firm value. We find a positive relation between firm value and the use of ERM. The ERM premium of roughly 20 percent is statistically and economically significant.     

Zombie Board: Board Tenure and Firm Performance

We show that board tenure exhibits an inverted U‐shaped relation with firm value and accounting performance. The quality of corporate decisions, such as M&A, financial reporting quality, and CEO compensation, also has a quadratic relation with board tenure. Our results are consistent with the interpretation that directors’ on‐the‐job learning improves firm value up to a threshold, at which point entrenchment dominates and firm performance suffers. To address endogeneity concerns, we use a sample of firms in which an outside director suffered a sudden death, and find that sudden deaths that move board tenure away from (toward) the empirically observed optimum level in the cross‐section are associated with negative (positive) announcement returns. The quality of corporate decisions also follows an inverted U‐shaped pattern in a sample of firms affected by the death of a director.     

事务所审计任期会影响审计质量吗?——来自发布补充更正公告的上市公司的经验证据

本文以中国A股市场上针对2003年至2009年年报发布过补充更正公告的上市公司为研究样本,对事务所任期与审计质量之间的关系进行了重新讨论。与现有文献不同,我们在讨论中引入了审计风险的概念。我们发现,虽然从整体上看,事务所任期越长,审计质量越差。但是,进一步的分析发现,这一现象仅仅存在于涉及到的审计风险相对较低的上市公司中,而对于补充更正内容涉及到的审计风险相对较高的上市公司来说,事务所审计任期对审计质量并没有产生显著影响。我们的分析结果表明,事务所任期对审计质量的影响是有限的。在较高的审计风险水平下,事务所不会因为任期较长而丧失审计独立性。     

An Assessment of the Provisions of Regulation (EU) No 537/2014 on Non-audit Services and Audit Firm Tenure: Evidence from Spain

On May 27, 2014, Regulation (EU) No 537/2014 was published in the Official Journal of the European Union. Aiming to enhance audit quality, the new regulation establishes important limitations to the selling of non-audit services by the audit firm to audit clients and a maximum tenure of ten years with the audit firm. However, it should be noted that the extant research has not consistently supported that non-audit services or long tenures impair the quality of audits. This research studies whether these provisions have been empirically associated with reduced audit quality for Spain. Because of its low litigation risk, the potentially negative impact of both non-audit services and tenure on audit quality should be clearly observed in the Spanish audit market. Nevertheless, we do not find significantly lower levels of audit quality associated with either non-audit services or long audit tenures. However, these results are conditional on the validity of using abnormal accruals to measure audit quality.     

Family control,expropriation, and investor protection: A panel data analysis of Western European corporations

We investigate whether the value impact of family control in Western European firms depends on country-level investor protection. To this aim, we account for ownership–value nonlinearities. Supporting that the risk of expropriation increases with high ownership concentration, we find an inverted U-shape relation between family control and firm value. Family firms incur a value discount when family equity holdings exceed approximately 50%. The nonlinear effect of family control is attributable to family firms from a strongly protective environment. When investor protection is weak, family control has a positive impact on firm value regardless of the ownership concentration level.     

Corporate social responsibility,product market perception,and firm value

We examine whether corporate social responsibility (CSR) is used to signal product quality and whether CSR affects firm value through its positive effect on product market perception. Using a proprietary database, we find that visible CSR, such as environmental and community involvement, positively impacts product market perception, particularly for standardized goods and in competitive industries, and that this impact is more pronounced for product quality attributes. Furthermore, we find that CSR indirectly increases firm value through an improvement in product market perception. We conclude that product market perception is a channel through which CSR creates firm value.     

CEO decision horizon and firm performance: An empirical investigation

We investigate the effect of top managers' myopia on firms' market valuation. We devise a measure of expected CEO tenure as a proxy for the length of CEO decision horizon. After accounting for the endogenous nature of CEO horizon, our empirical tests show that shorter CEO horizon is associated with more agency costs, lower firm valuation and higher levels of information risk. The results are consistent with the notion that a short CEO decision horizon is indicative of preference for investments that offer relatively faster paybacks at the expense of long-term value creation.     

Threat of termination and firm innovation

This study investigates how the ex-ante threat of termination affects firm performance in innovation measured by number of patents and citations. Empirical results show that the threat of termination is negatively associated with both measures of firm innovation. This relation however is sensitive to industry structure. The negative effect of the threat of termination on innovation is statistically significant only for high-tech firms. For low-tech firms there is no statistically significant relation between the threat of termination and firm innovation. One plausible explanation is that high-tech firms are inherently risky and have higher rates of project failure. Adding the risk of higher threat of termination makes the manager more risk averse and forces her to avoid investing in value increasing innovations. Managers in low-tech firms don’t face such pressures. The policy implication is that high-tech firms should lower threat of termination and increase tolerance for project failure to encourage innovation.     

CEO's managerial power,board committee memberships and idiosyncratic volatility

Based on Upper Echelons Theory and Agency Theory, we explore the effect of CEOs' power through their tenure, board committee membership and other corporate governance factors on idiosyncratic volatility. Our study addresses the gap in the literature to find the direct link between the source of corporate governance practices and idiosyncratic volatility in stock price. We use a generalised method of moments in a panel analysis of Australian firms for 2004–2013 and a robust model that controls for firm size, firm age, trading volume, market-to-book ratio, dividend payout, the global financial crisis, product market competition and financial intermediaries. We find that CEOs who have stronger managerial power are associated with lower idiosyncratic volatility. This determining factor remains significant with the inclusion of widely-researched firm characteristics and external factors on idiosyncratic volatility in our robust analysis.