Signaling Firm Performance Through Financial Statement Presentation: An Analysis Using Special Items*

This paper investigates whether managers’ presentation of special items within the financial statements reflects economic performance or opportunism. Specifically, we assess special items presented as a separate line item on the income statement (income statement presentation) to those aggregated within another line item with disclosure only in the footnotes (footnote presentation). Our study is motivated by standard‐setting interest in performance reporting and financial statement presentation, as well as prior research investigating managers’ presentation choices in other contexts. Empirical results reveal that special items receiving income statement presentation are less persistent relative to those receiving footnote presentation. These results are consistent across numerous alternative specifications. Overall, the findings are consistent with managers using the income statement versus footnote presentation to assist users in identifying those special items most likely to differ from other components of earnings — that is, for informational, as opposed to opportunistic, motivations.     

Credit Rating Agency and Equity Analysts’ Adjustments to GAAP Earnings

Moody's analysts and sell‐side equity analysts adjust GAAP earnings as part of their research. We show that adjusted earnings definitions of Moody's analysts are significantly lower than those of equity analysts when companies exhibit higher downside risk, as measured by volatility in idiosyncratic stock returns, volatility in negative market returns, poor earnings, and loss status. Relative to the adjusted earnings definitions of equity analysts, adjusted earnings definitions of Moody's analysts better predict future bankruptcies, yet they fare significantly worse in predicting future earnings and operating cash flows. These findings persist after controlling for optimism incentives of analysts, reporting incentives of companies, credit rating levels, and industry and year effects. Our findings suggest that credit rating agencies cater to their clients’ demand for a more conservative interpretation of company‐reported performance than what is offered by equity analysts.     

Equity‐Based Compensation of Outside Directors and Corporate Disclosure Quality

We examine the relationship between a firm's disclosure quality and equity‐based compensation of independent members of the board of directors. The dimensions of disclosure quality we focus on are management's earnings guidance and information flowthrough financial analysts. Using both levels and changes specifications, we find the average ratio of equity‐based pay to total pay of independent board members to be positively related to a firm's disclosure quality. Our findings are robust to the inclusion of management's equity‐based compensation, other governance measures, and financial controls, and robust to instrumental variable tests of endogeneity. Furthermore, we find directors’ equity‐based compensation to be negatively associated with the firm's cost of equity capital. Our results are consistent with equity‐based compensation providing incentives to independent directors to push for better disclosure quality.     

Economic Consequences of IFRS Adoption: The Role of Changes in Disclosure Quality*

This study adopts a two‐step approach to highlight the disclosure quality channel that drives economic consequences of IFRS adoption. This approach helps address the identification challenge noted by prior research and offers direct evidence on the role of disclosure quality. In the first step, we document the impact of the IFRS mandate on changes in disclosure quality proxied by the granularity of line item disclosure in financial statements. We find that IFRS‐adopting firms provide more disaggregated information upon IFRS adoption, such as more granular disclosure of intangible assets and long‐term investments on the balance sheet and greater disaggregation of depreciation, amortization, and nonoperating income items on the income statement. In the second step, we link the observed disclosure changes to the benefits and costs of IFRS adoption. We show that greater disaggregated information due to IFRS adoption enhances market liquidity and decreases information asymmetry, but does not affect audit fees differentially. Our evidence has implications for standard setters as they evaluate cost‐benefit trade‐offs when considering disclosure changes in the future.     

Express Yourself: Why Managers' Disclosure Tone Varies Across Time and What Investors Learn from It

We argue that volatility in a manager's disclosure tone across time should be a function of two components: (i) the firm's innate operating risk and (ii) the extent to which the manager's disclosure transparently reflects that risk. Consistent with this argument, we find that both operating risk and disclosure transparency are important determinants of disclosure tone volatility. We then examine whether investors incorporate the incremental information provided by disclosure tone volatility into their assessments of firm risk. If disclosure tone volatility primarily provides investors with incremental information about a firm's operating risk, we should find a positive association between tone volatility and market-based assessments of risk. On the other hand, if disclosure tone volatility primarily provides investors with incremental information about a manager's disclosure transparency, we should find a negative association between tone volatility and market-based assessments of risk. Consistent with an operating risk explanation, we find a positive association between disclosure tone volatility and market-based assessments of firm risk after controlling for a comprehensive set of proxies for operating risk and transparency. We find little support for an information risk explanation, even when we examine multiple measures specifically designed to capture information risk. Taken together, our results suggest that although disclosure tone volatility is a function of both a firm's operating risk and a manager's disclosure transparency, investors appear to respond as if disclosure tone volatility only provides incremental information about a firm's operating risk.     

Home Country Investor Protection,Ownership Structure and Cross‐Listed Firms' Compliance with SOX‐Mandated Internal Control Deficiency Disclosures

We examine whether home country investor protection and ownership structure affect cross‐listed firms' compliance with SOX‐mandated internal control deficiency (ICD) disclosures. We develop a proxy for the likelihood of cross‐listed firms' ICD misreporting during the Section 302 reporting regime. For cross‐listed firms domiciled in weak investor protection countries, we have three main findings. First, firms whose managers control their firms and have voting rights in excess of cash flow rights are more likely to misreport ICD than other firms during the Section 302 reporting regime. Second, there is a positive association between the likelihood of ICD misreporting and voluntary deregistration from the SEC prior to the Section 404 effective date. Third, for firms that chose not to deregister, there is a positive association between the likelihood of ICD misreporting and the reporting of previously undisclosed ICDs during the Section 404 reporting regime. We do not find similar evidence for cross‐listed firms domiciled in strong investor protection countries. Our findings are consistent with the hypothesis that, for cross‐listed firms domiciled in weak investor protection countries, managers who have the ability and incentive to expropriate outside minority shareholders are reluctant to disclose ICDs in order to protect their private control benefits. The results of our study should be of interest to regulators who wish to identify noncompliant firms for closer supervision, investors who wish to identify ex ante red flags for poor financial disclosure quality, and researchers who wish to understand the economic forces governing cross‐listed firms' financial disclosure behavior.     

How Disclosure Features of Corporate Social Responsibility Reports Interact with Investor Numeracy to Influence Investor Judgments

Firms’ Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) reports typically frame their strategies in terms of either community or global efforts (i.e., “strategy frame”). Further, the style used to depict CSR performance in reports often highlights either pictures or words (i.e., “presentation style”). These two prominent disclosure features of CSR reports promote a natural fit or misfit in the focus (relatively low‐level or high‐level focus) investors adopt when thinking about the firm and its CSR efforts. Further, these disclosure features likely have different effects on investors depending on their numeracy or, in other words, the way that they naturally process numerical information. In this study, we predict and find that a fit between the strategy frame and the presentation style of a firm's CSR report causes less numerate investors to be more willing to invest than when a fit is not present. Specifically, we find that a fit leads less numerate investors to experience subjective feelings of processing fluency and, in turn, positive affect that serves as a cue that the positive CSR performance information can be relied upon, which positively influences willingness to invest. Our results have implications for both CSR reports as well as other types of firm disclosures that increasingly vary along similar disclosure characteristics. Our results also contribute to both the growing literature on presentation effects in accounting, as well as the broader business literature on CSR reporting.     

Does Fair Value Accounting Contribute to Systemic Risk in the Banking Industry?

I investigate whether fair value accounting can contribute to the banking industry's systemic risk. I focus on the adoption of Statement of Financial Accounting Standard No. 115 (SFAS No. 115), which required available‐for‐sale (AFS) securities to be recognized at fair value with unrealized gains and losses included in equity through accumulated other comprehensive income. SFAS No. 115 increased banks' regulatory risk because, at the time, calculation of regulatory capital closely conformed with GAAP equity. I find that systemic risk increased following the adoption of SFAS No. 115. Furthermore, following a subsequent regulatory amendment—which excluded unrealized gains and losses on AFS securities from regulatory capital but did not change their GAAP treatment—systemic risk decreased. Taken together, the evidence suggests that fair value accounting has the potential to increase systemic risk through the explicit inclusion of volatile fair value estimates in regulatory bank capital adequacy assessments. I do not, however, find evidence of fair value accounting impacting systemic risk in its information role; that is, by providing information to a bank's external stakeholders about its financial position and performance. I also show that higher fair value volatility of investment securities, lower bank capital, and larger AFS security holdings increase banks' marginal contribution to systemic risk. My findings should interest regulators and policymakers, as recent regulatory changes in light of Basel III recommendations require unrealized gains and losses on AFS securities to be included in regulatory capital for advanced approaches banks.     

Auditor Choice and Its Implications for Group‐Affiliated Firms

We examine which of two opposing financial reporting incentives that group‐affiliated firms experience shapes their accounting transparency evident in auditor choice. In one direction, complex group structure and intragroup transactions enable controlling shareholders to pursue diversionary activities that they later hide by distorting reported earnings. In the other direction, as outside investors price‐protect against potential expropriation, controlling shareholders may be eager to improve financial reporting quality in order to alleviate agency costs. To empirically clarify whether group affiliation affects company insiders' incentives to address minority shareholders' concerns over agency costs, we examine auditor selection of group firms relative to stand‐alone firms. In comparison to nongroup firms, our evidence implies that group firms are more likely to appoint Top 10 audit firms in China, especially when their controlling shareholders have stronger incentives to improve external monitoring of the financial reporting process. After isolating group firms, we find that the presence of a Top 10 auditor translates into higher earnings and disclosure quality, higher valuation implications for related‐party transactions, and cheaper equity financing, implying that these firms benefit from engaging a high‐quality auditor. In additional analysis consistent with our predictions, we find that group firms that are Top 10 clients pay higher audit fees and their controlling shareholders are more constrained against meeting earnings benchmarks through intragroup transactions and siphoning corporate resources at the expense of minority investors. Collectively, our evidence supports the narrative that insiders in firms belonging to business groups weigh the costs and benefits stemming from auditor choice.     

Audit Qualifications of Income‐Decreasing Accounting Choices*

In this study we conduct an experiment to examine how qualifying an income‐decreasing accounting change in years of strong financial performance affects financial report users' assessments of strategic reporting, current financial performance, and future financial performance (performance over the next three years). We find that without the qualification, users viewed the income‐decreasing accounting change as relatively nonstrategic and that user assessments of current and future performance were not different. In the presence of the qualification, users believed that the accounting change was relatively strategic, and they discounted the income effect of the accounting change. We find further that their assessments of future performance were below their assessments of current performance but no different from the assessments of future performance in the absence of the qualification. Although our findings suggest that audit qualifications encourage users to be skeptical of income‐decreasing accounting changes, we find no evidence that they impose negative consequences on management in terms of lower assessments of financial performance.     

Voluntary Disclosure and Equity Offerings: Reducing Information Asymmetry or Hyping the Stock?*

We examine corporate disclosure activity around seasoned equity offerings and its relationship to stock prices. Beginning six months before the offering, our sample issuing firms dramatically increase their disclosure activity, particularly for the categories of disclosure over which firms have the most discretion. The increase is significant after controlling for the firm's current and future earnings performance and tends to be largest for firms with selling shareholders participating in the offering. However, there is no change in the frequency of forward‐looking statements prior to the equity offering, something that is expressly discouraged by the securities law. Firms that maintain a consistent level of disclosure experience price increases prior to the offering, and only minor price declines at the offering announcement relative to the control firms, suggesting that disclosure may have reduced the information asymmetry inherent in the offering. Firms that substantially increase their disclosure activity in the six months before the offering also experience price increases prior to the offering relative to the control firms, but suffer much larger price declines at the announcement of their intent to issue equity, suggesting that the disclosure increase may have been used to “hype the stock” and the market may have partially corrected for the earlier price increase. Firms that maintain a consistent disclosure level have no unusual return behavior relative to the control firms subsequent to the announcement, while the firms that “hyped” their stock continue to suffer negative returns, providing further evidence that the increased disclosure activity may have been hype, and suggesting that the hype may have been successful in lowering the firms' cost of equity capital.     

LONG MEMORY IN THE VOLATILITY OF AN EMERGING FIXED‐INCOME MARKET: EVIDENCE FROM SOUTH AFRICA

This paper tests for long memory in volatility of fixed‐income returns; specifically, South Africa's local currency 10‐year government bond, given that the characterisation of stochastic long‐memory volatility is of interest and importance in portfolio and risk management. The long‐memory parameter is estimated using methods based on wavelets, which have gained prominence in recent years. Evidence of long memory in fixed‐income return volatility is conclusively demonstrated across a variety of volatility measures and wavelet forms. This finding suggests a pattern of time dependence, which may potentially be exploited to generate improved volatility forecasting performance especially over long horizons. This paper further extends the extant literature by comparing the predictive power of long‐memory forecasts with those obtained from a standard (short‐memory) generalised autoregressive conditional heteroskedasticity (GARCH) process. The results of this exercise suggest that the information content of long‐memory models does not lead to improved forecast accuracy. The GARCH(1,1) model is shown to provide the best forecasts across most horizons (i.e. daily, weekly and monthly). Forecast performance is further revealed to be sensitive to the choice of volatility proxy used. Finally, the derived volatility forecasts are generally very close, and in some cases, almost indistinguishable.     

Earnings Management: Do Firms Play “Follow the Leader”?

In this study we examine whether the reported performance of one firm affects the discretionary reporting behavior of another firm. We do this by identifying the leader within each industry, defined as the first large announcing firm. We find that the discretionary performance of followers (those firms announcing after the leader) relates positively to the leader's reported performance. Specifically, when the leader misses analysts’ expectations, followers report lower discretionary accruals, have fewer income‐decreasing special items, and are less likely to meet analysts’ expectations. In contrast, when leaders report good news, followers report higher discretionary accruals and are more likely to meet expectations (although we do not find evidence of a positive association between leaders’ good news and followers’ income‐decreasing special items). Overall, the results are consistent with managers of followers perceiving that earnings news of the leader will affect investors’ and others’ performance expectations for their firms.     

Operational Restructuring Charges and Post‐Restructuring Performance*

Firms incur restructuring charges as a result of actions intended to improve their operating performance. However, there is little evidence on whether restructuring charges are associated with improved performance. We examine a sample of firms reporting restructuring in 1991‐93 and find that the restructuring firms' earnings increase over the levels immediately before restructuring. Compared with a control sample of firms that report no restructuring, the restructuring firms improve their earnings and operating income, but evidence for improvements in cash flow from operations is mixed. In regression analysis, we find that restructuring charges are significantly positively associated with post‐restructuring changes in earnings relative to the restructuring year, but this association is largely driven by firms with multiple restructurings and firms reporting losses in the restructuring year. We find no association between restructuring charges and post‐restructuring changes in earnings relative to the year before restructuring. Restructuring charges are significantly positively associated with post‐restructuring changes in operating income and cash flow from operations for firms with multiple restructurings. In summary, restructuring charges are associated with improved earnings, but our results suggest that restructuring in the early 1990s did not necessarily guarantee improved operating performance.     

Forecasting Risk in Earnings

Conventional measures of risk in earnings based on historical standard deviation require long time‐series data and are inadequate when the distribution of earnings deviates from normality. We introduce a methodology based on current fundamentals and quantile regression to forecast risk reflected in the shape of the distribution of future earnings. We derive measures of dispersion, asymmetry, and tail risk in future earnings using quantile forecasts as inputs. Our analysis shows that a parsimonious model based on accruals, cash flows, special items, and a loss indicator can predict the shape of the distribution of earnings with reasonable power. We provide evidence that out‐of‐sample quantile‐based risk forecasts explain incrementally analysts' equity and credit risk ratings, future return volatility, corporate bond spreads, and analyst‐based measures of future earnings uncertainty. Our study provides insights into the relations between earnings components and risk in future earnings. It also introduces risk measures that will be useful for participants in both the equity and credit markets.     

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.     

Disclosure Overload? A Professional User Perspective on the Usefulness of General Purpose Financial Statements

We survey a broad group of professionals who use financial statements as part of their job to assess the extent to which they believe financial reports suffer from disclosure overload. Consistent with the claims made by regulators, auditors, and preparers, we find that a significant portion of professional financial statement users believe disclosure overload is a problem. However, this group is in the minority, with about twice as many professional users believing that overload is not a problem and that more information should be disclosed in financial statements. This dichotomy presents a difficult challenge to standard setters aiming to improve financial reporting by altering the amount of information provided in financial reports. To that end, we complement existing research on the informativeness of accounting information by measuring perceptions of the usefulness of the various financial statements and their footnotes across a variety of tasks. Finally, we develop a framework that could be useful in developing a theory of disclosure overload.     

Firm-specific volatility of stock returns, the credibility of management forecasts, and media coverage: Evidence from Japanese firms

This paper explores the determinants of firm-specific informativeness of the stock price in terms of corporate disclosure quality and the quantity of public information by using Japanese data. In our empirical framework, we examine how the credibility of disclosure and media coverage are associated with the firm-specific volatility of stock returns. The results indicate that both greater accuracy of management forecasts and greater total media coverage contribute to the incorporation of firm-specific information in the stock price. Furthermore, for earnings-related news, the media reporting leads to less firm-specific volatility. Finally, an improvement in forecast accuracy enhances the marginal effect of media coverage of the earnings news toward reflecting firm-specific information.     

Endogeneity and the Dynamics of Voluntary Disclosure Quality: Is there Really an Effect on the Cost of Equity Capital?*

Research on the effects of voluntary disclosure quality on the cost of equity capital is often plagued by endogeneity concerns. In this paper, I use a dynamic panel system GMM estimator, which provides internal instruments from the firm's history that directly address endogeneity arising from unobserved heterogeneity and simultaneity. By using hand-collected voluntary disclosure scores for firms listed in the Swiss stock exchange, I examine the dynamic relation between voluntary disclosure quality and the cost of equity capital in a panel over a period of 10 years. The results suggest that the relation between voluntary disclosure quality and the cost of equity capital becomes insignificant after controlling adequately for potential dynamic endogeneity, simultaneity, and unobserved heterogeneity.     

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.