The role of rating agencies in the market for charitable contributions: An empirical test

Rating agencies play the role of information intermediaries in the market for donations. These watchdog organizations obtain and interpret accounting data and other information about charitable organizations and report ratings to help donors select among the many organizations soliciting contributions. In the age of the internet, information from Internal Revenue Service Form 990 returns prepared by tax-exempt organizations is more readily accessible than ever before. This study examines whether the zero- to four-star ratings provided by Charity Navigator have additional information content for donors. Charity Navigator was selected because its rating system relies almost exclusively on the 990 returns and presumably adds value by incorporating peer-group expectations for various ratios and by presenting straightforward and concise data. Using a random sample of 405 charities rated by Charity Navigator, our results suggest that rating changes do impact contributions. Positive rating changes were associated with an increase in contributions and organizations with a decline in rating were associated with decreased contributions. These effects were in addition to what would be predicted using an efficiency ratio commonly computed from Form 990 accounting data and other control variables.     

Nonprofit executive incentive pay

We utilize information only recently disclosed on Form 990 to examine the use, and consequences of, incentive pay at nonprofit organizations. Bonuses are common in nonprofits, as we observe that approximately 45% of the 44,000 organization-year observations in our sample reported paying CEO bonuses. We find that the bonuses are positively associated with profitability, competition from other nonprofits, firm size, available cash, and use of compensation consultants and committees, while negatively related to board oversight, donations, and grants. Our results also suggest that donors look unfavorably at the payment of bonuses; that is, bonuses are associated with lower future donations. Nonetheless, we find evidence consistent with the payment of bonuses incentivizing nonprofit executives, as despite reduced fundraising, future profitability and program services are positively associated with current bonus compensation.     

Equity and debt issuance by firms violating GAAP

We examine security issuance in restated periods by firms that misreport financial statements and find that only a small per cent of such firms issues securities in the restated period. Investors are misled by mistakes made by firms issuing equity more so than other restating firms at the initial announcement of misreported earnings, but are not misled by mistakes made by debt‐issuing firms. Equity‐issuing firms that manage earnings to beat analyst expectations experience abnormally high returns in the restated period prior to security issuance. Firms that restated more reports and have higher pre‐mistake returns are more likely to issue equity. High leverage, firm size and number of restated periods are positively associated with the likelihood of debt issuance by restating firms.     

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.     

An Experimental Examination of US Individual Donors’ Information Needs and Use

This paper adopts an internet‐based experiment to investigate whether and how individual donors use nonprofit organizations’ financial and nonfinancial information when making their donation decisions. Using undergraduate students in the United States (US) to proxy for individual donors, our results indicate that individual donors are more likely to acquire nonfinancial information, such as nonprofit organizations’ goals, outcomes, programs and missions, than financial information. Donors integrate nonfinancial information into their decisions as their actual donations are significantly correlated with such information. Our results also indicate that while individual donors acquire financial efficiency measures, including the program expense ratio and fundraising expense ratio, they do not seem to integrate such information into their decisions as their actual donations are not significantly correlated with the efficiency information. This study contributes to the nonprofit literature and research domain focusing on charitable giving and donor preferences.     

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.     

慈善组织财务信息披露质量的影响因素与后果研究

本文调查并实证检验了慈善组织财务信息披露质量的影响因素及后果。基金会财务信息披露质量受组织复杂性和管理效率的影响,但影响公募和非公募基金会财务信息披露质量的因素存在差异。成立年限长、管理效率高、非教育助学类的公募基金会财务信息披露质量更高,收入来源分散和管理效率较高的非公募基金会财务信息披露质量更高。而且,基金会财务信息披露质量与后期捐赠收入显著正相关。本文研究证明了财务信息披露质量的确能影响捐赠者的捐赠决策,加强慈善组织财务信息披露监管显得非常必要。     

我国民间非营利组织会计规范问题

文章分析了我国民间非营利组织在市场经济发展中的重要作用以及对其进行会计规范的必要性和紧迫性 ,并就我国民间非营利组织会计制度体系的设计和民间非营利组织的界定问题进行了探讨。最后 ,文章就我国民间非营利组织所涉及的基本会计问题及其规范作了重点研讨 ,并提出了规范建议     

Perks and the informativeness of stock prices in the Chinese market

While the literature shows that perks can affect firm values positively or negatively, we argue that firms with higher perks are more likely to be associated with a lower quality of financial reporting, which, in turn, can affect the informativeness of stock prices. Based on hand-collected data on perks from Chinese listed firms, we find that firms with lower perks are associated with higher informativeness of stock prices (or lower R-square). Moreover, the positive association between perks and R-square is shown to be weaker for firms with higher financial reporting quality through audit and earnings quality measures.     

Adjustments For 'Extraordinary Items'In Smoothing Reported Profits of Listed Australian Companies: Some Empirical Evidence

Nothing is more likely to undermine the credibility of financial reporting than the suspicion that the results reported were predetermined and that the accounting methods used were selected to produce the results desired by the preparers of the report', Solomons (1983).     

Audit committee composition and the use of an industry specialist audit firm

Independent, competent boards of directors and audit committees are said to be important mechanisms of corporate governance. The purpose of the present study is to empirically examine the association between audit committee composition and audit quality. Specifically, the link between the proportion of non‐executive directors on an audit committee, financial qualifications of directors and the number of audit committee meetings held in a year are investigated and expected to have a positive association with the quality of the audit firm used. Audit quality is proxied by industry specialization. The results support the link between a higher proportion of non‐executive directors on an audit committee and use of an industry specialist audit firm. Other measures of audit committee quality (those with a higher proportion of directors with financial qualifications and those that meet more frequently) are not significantly associated with the use of an industry specialist audit firm. Sensitivity analysis shows that the presence of an audit committee is linked to use of an industry specialist audit firm.     

Hometown advantage: The effects of monitoring institution location on financial reporting discretion

We examine the impact of institutional ownership on financial reporting discretion, focusing on whether the impact varies with institutions' cost of acquiring monitoring information. Using geographic distance between the firm and the institutional investor as a proxy for the cost of acquiring monitoring information, we find that corporate managers are less likely to use financial reporting discretion in the presence of local monitoring institutions than distant monitoring institutions. We also find that the impact of monitoring institutions on financial reporting discretion varies with the costs and benefits of financial reporting discretion.     

Earnings Quality Measures and Excess Returns

This paper examines how commonly used earnings quality measures fulfill a key objective of financial reporting, i.e., improving decision usefulness for investors. We propose a stock‐price‐based measure for assessing the quality of earnings quality measures. We predict that firms with higher earnings quality will be less mispriced than other firms. Mispricing is measured by the difference of the mean absolute excess returns of portfolios formed on high and low values of a measure. We examine persistence, predictability, two measures of smoothness, abnormal accruals, accruals quality, earnings response coefficient and value relevance. For a large sample of US non‐financial firms over the period 1988–2007, we show that all measures except for smoothness are negatively associated with absolute excess returns, suggesting that smoothness is generally a favorable attribute of earnings. Accruals measures generate the largest spread in absolute excess returns, followed by smoothness and market‐based measures. These results lend support to the widespread use of accruals measures as overall measures of earnings quality in the literature.     

An investigation of how the informal communication of firm preferences influences managerial honesty

This study investigates the effectiveness of informal firm communication at motivating managerial honesty. Specifically, it focuses on the effectiveness of informal cost targets, which communicate firms’ specific cost preferences to managers without tying managers’ compensation to reporting costs that meet those targets. I develop predictions about how the tightness of an informal cost target influences the effect that a cost target has on managers’ reporting honesty. Using an experimental setting, I examine three levels of target tightness—loose, moderate, and tight—within a uniformly distributed cost range and where participants’ financial incentives are to ignore the cost target and fully misreport their cost information. I find that both moderate and loose cost targets, on average, increase honesty relative to when the firm does not communicate a specific target or it communicates a tight target. Tight targets have no significant effect, positive or negative, on honesty. Whereas prior research focuses only on the potential benefits of firms communicating their general preferences, my study provides important insights regarding the potential incremental effectiveness of communicating specific preferences.     

Switching due diligence auditor in Chinese mergers and acquisitions

The routine financial reporting auditor (FR auditor) of an acquiring firm has the advantage of knowing the acquirer very well, however, a large portion of acquirers in China do not use their FR auditor to continue serve as their due diligence auditor (DD auditor) in the takeover process. Using a sample of 818 takeover transactions from 2004 to 2014, we find that the acquiring firms are more likely to appoint a new DD auditor for M&A, instead of using the incumbent one, when the FR auditor is not an industry specialist and the acquiring firms’ financial reporting quality is low. For low financial reporting quality acquiring firms, changing to a new DD auditor can prevent negative market reactions when firms make the M&A announcement, but firms have to pay a higher premium. Our results remain robust when using alternative definitions of industry specialisation and measures of financial reporting quality.     

Bridging the Information Gap: Quarterly Conference Calls as a Medium for Voluntary Disclosure

This paper uses the quarterly conference call as a disclosure metric to examine whether firms with less informative financial statements are more likely to respond by providing additional voluntary disclosure. After controlling for other characteristics of a firm's information environment, I find a significant inverse relation between measures of the informativeness of a firm's financial statements and the likelihood that the firm will use a quarterly conference call. This finding is consistent with the hypothesis in Verrecchia (1990) that the probability of disclosure of management's private information is negatively related to the precision of prior public information on firm value.     

Application of International Financial Reporting Standards in the Transition Economy of Serbia

This paper explores the attitudes of the preparers of financial statements in the emerging economy of Serbia towards International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS). Our research shows that preparers are mainly satisfied with the quality of IFRS and the environment for IFRS application in Serbia and that they generally support the process of global convergence of financial reporting standards. Nevertheless, we find that there is a need to improve the environment for IFRS application in Serbia, and we identify areas that financial reporting regulators in emerging economies should address when attempting to improve the environment for IFRS application. Our research also shows that perceived IFRS quality is dependent on the preparer's experience in applying IFRS and his or her perceptions of the environment in which IFRS are applied. Perceived IFRS quality and attitudes towards the compatibility between IFRS and the environment for application of IFRS affect the level of support for the global convergence of financial reporting standards.     

The moderating role of board gender diversity on the relationship between firm opacity and stock returns

In this study, we examine the impact of board gender diversity on the association between firm opacity and stock price crash. We utilize the negative shock of the 2007–2008 financial crisis to capital markets to examine whether firms with gender-diverse boards witnessed lower stock price crashes due to their lower opacity ex ante. Using a sample of S&P 1500 firms spanning the period 2005–2008, we employ a difference-in-differences research design and find that firms with high opacity ex ante witness more negative returns ex post. We also find that gender-diverse firms ex ante witness less negative returns ex post. Finally, our analysis reveals the moderating role that board gender diversity plays in the association between firm opacity and stock returns around the financial crisis. We subject our results to a range of robustness checks, including instrumental variable regressions, matched-sample analyses, and a set of falsification and placebo tests. Overall, we provide evidence that board gender diversity is associated with increased transparency in financial reporting, which pays off in times of crisis.     

Audit firm tenure and financial restatements: An analysis of industry specialization and fee effects

This study investigates the relation between audit firm tenure and clients’ financial restatements. Specifically, we extend the audit tenure literature by assessing restatement-based reporting failures using dimensions of auditor expertise and independence previously assumed to underlie short and long audit tenure problems. Short tenure expertise and independence effects are hypothesized using audit firm industry specialization and audit fees as proxies. Long tenure independence effects are hypothesized using nonaudit fees as a proxy. Using matched-sample logistic regression and 382 companies with and without financial restatements during 2000–2004, the results support prior findings by indicating a negative relation between the length of the auditor–client relationship and the likelihood of restatement. For short tenure engagements, we find that auditor industry specialization and audit fees are negatively related to the likelihood of restatement. This result is consistent with concerns about reduced audit quality due to a lack of client-specific knowledge and low audit fees on new audit engagements. Alternatively, the long tenure results indicate an insignificant relation between nonaudit fees and the likelihood of restatement. This finding contradicts independence concerns about nonaudit fees paid to entrenched auditors.