ESTIMATING THE INTERNAL RATE OF RETURN FROM PUBLISHED FINANCIAL STATEMENTS: A COMMENT

In a recent issue of this journal T. Salmi attempted to estimate the internal rate of return from published financial statements. Two reasons lead to the conclu- sions that his approach is partly in error. The first is a technical one. Also it has been proved that his objective, estimating the IRR in the case that it is approximately equal to the growth rate, can be reached in a much simpler way.     

Accounting Returns Revisited: Evidence of their Usefulness in Estimating Economic Returns

Accounting information is used for measuring firm performance in various financial applications—a practice supported by empirical studies demonstrating the value relevance of accounting numbers, but disputed by theoretical papers arguing that a firm's accounting rate of return (ARR) serves poorly as a proxy for its internal rate of return (IRR). We derive a new model of the ARR–IRR relation, and describe how the conservatism of GAAP constrains a firm's IRR to fall in a range bounded by its historical growth rate and ARR. Using cross-sectional data, we demonstrate that economic returns can be estimated from accounting numbers for many firms. We link empirical results to underlying economic theory, and thus contribute to understanding why accounting information is value relevant.     

Same information,different value: New evidence on the value of voluntary assurance

This paper examines whether there is a difference in the value of voluntarily assured financial statements of private firms, depending on the availability of other information for the users of the statements. By using a within-firm estimator that completely controls for firm fixed effects, we find that the loan interest rate for private firms with voluntarily assured financial statements is lower when the firms have longer relationships with their banks. This finding suggests that the value of assured financial statements differs among the same type of users (banks), and is larger for those that accumulate soft information through long-term lending relationships. We also find that this larger value is not present when the tenure of the auditor with the client is very long.     

Economic Growth and Financial Statement Verification

We use a proprietary data set of financial statements collected by banks to examine whether economic growth is related to the use of financial statement verification in debt financing. Exploiting the distinct economic growth and contraction patterns of the construction industry over the years 2002–2011, our estimates reveal that banks reduced their collection of unqualified audited financial statements from construction firms at nearly twice the rate of firms in other industries during the housing boom period before 2008. This reduction was most severe in the regions that experienced the most significant construction growth. These trends reversed during the subsequent housing crisis in 2008–2011 when construction activity contracted. Moreover, using bank‐ and firm‐level data, we find a strong negative (positive) relation between audited financial statements during the growth period, and subsequent loan losses (construction firm survival) during the contraction period. Collectively, our results reveal that macroeconomic fluctuations produce temporal shifts in the overall level of financial statement verification and temporal shifts in verification are related to bank loan portfolio quality and borrower performance.     

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.     

Financial clusters,industry groups,and stock return correlations

Industry classifications are used by investors, economists, and policy makers for a great variety of purposes. The traditional economic‐activity‐based systems (Global Industry Classification Standard, North American Industry Classification System, Standard Industrial Classification, and Fama–French) have been supplemented in recent years by alternative classification systems. Our purpose is to provide another alternative system that forms classification groups based on the structure of firm financial statements. Using cluster analysis, a multivariate tool that forms groups where their characteristics are similar within groups and distinct across groups, we form clusters of large U.S. firms based on their common‐size financial statements (percentage breakdowns of balance sheets and income statements). We characterize the financial clusters based on their industry classifications and other economic information and assess the ability of financial clusters and industry groups, separately and jointly, to explain stock return correlations of all pairs of firms. Our results demonstrate that using financial clusters and industry groups together proves advantageous relative to using either alone.     

The Role of Holding Company Financial Information in the Insurer-Rating Process: Evidence From the Property-Liability Industry

We examine data for the year ended December 31, 1997 for 80 publicly traded property‐liability insurers that have Best financial strength ratings of their consolidated insurance‐operating subsidiaries. These firms employ a holding company structure, in which a parent owns the stock of multiple insurance‐operating subsidiaries. The operating subsidiaries prepare a consolidated annual report using the Statutory Accounting Principles (SAP), and an analogous set of financial statements based on the Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP) is released by the parent. We find that the financial characteristics important in determining ratings at the individual firm level—capitalization, liquidity, profitability, and size—are also important at the group level. Further, financial ratios from holding company statements are incrementally useful in the ratings' process, after group‐level ratios have been taken into account. Robustness tests based on a subsample of holding companies with minimal investment outside of the property‐liability industry reinforce our conclusion that parent company statements influence consolidated group ratings. However, our data do not allow us to separate the relative contribution of the GAAP model and underlying transactions to the ratings decision.     

MANAGERIAL REMUNERATION AND ACCOUNTING FOR RECURRING EXTRAORDINARY ITEMS

The Australian standard on income statements (AAS 1) was recently amended to require that extraordinary items be non-recurring. Although the amendment applies from 1990, the Corporations Law requires that comparative financial statements for 1989, complying with the new rule, be included with the 1990 financial statements. Comparison of these with actual financial statements for 1989 indicates how the statements would have differed in 1989 if the standard had then required extraordinary items to be non-recurring. The differences are investigated to partially explain cross sectional differences in firms' classification criteria. Results imply that managers who are remunerated highly (relative to the magnitude of the earnings of the firm) prefer to classify gains as operating and losses as extraordinary.     

Audit technology and preferences for auditing standards

This paper investigates factors associated with audit firm positions on Auditing Standards Board issues during the three-year period ending during 1984. The major finding is that firms with relatively structured audit technologies tend to favor proposed statements while firms with relatively unstructured technologies do not. Audit firm size is not associated with firm position. Also, Big 8 firms favoring proposed statements have lower staff-to-partner ratios and concentrate less in auditing. The staff-to-partner ratio is negatively associated with technology. The results' implications for auditing profession organization studies and auditing and financial reporting research are investigated.     

Mythical representations of trust in auditors and the preservation of social order in the financial community

The present paper investigates financial practitioners’ use and perception of audited financial statements. In-depth interviews, which we conducted with Canadian institutional investors, financial analysts and bankers, indicate: (1) a firm tendency to favour the quality of management over the content of financial statements in investment decisions and recommendation processes; and (2) a fundamental scepticism regarding the work of auditors. However, representations of auditor trustworthiness abound in formal texts surrounding the financial analysis domain—as if audited financial statements and the trust they convey towards numbers are indispensable to the work of financial analysts. Based on the work of Roland Barthes, we argue that financial practitioners’ trust in auditors constitutes a mythical representation whose main function is to maintain order and reproduce status quo within the financial system.     

Onesource Corporate Consulting,Inc.: Tax and financial reporting considerations

This case places you in the role of a new staff accountant at a public accounting firm who is asked to research financial accounting and tax issues for a client engagement. The client, Onesource Corporate Consulting, Inc. is a large, rapidly growing and successful consulting firm that specializes in corporate restructuring work, forensic investigations, litigation consulting, strategic communications consulting, economic consulting, and technology development. You must research issues affecting the company’s financial statements and tax reporting, including: contingent debt, forgivable loans issued to employees, revenue recognition for various types of contracts, and lease incentives. You will likely find this case challenging. However, this case is based on a real company and the research and analysis required in this case is reflective of issues and assignments you may encounter early in your career.     

Audit firm, corporate governance, and audit quality: Evidence from Bahrain

The aim of this research is to document the perceptions of credit and financial analysts with regard to the relationship between the effectiveness of audit committee, size of the auditing firm and audit quality in the context of Bahrain, which is characterized by a developed financial sector, low-liquidity stock market, low turnover in board of directors of listed firms, an inactive merger and acquisitions market and almost non-extent litigation. A survey of 300 credit and financial analysts shows that analysts considered auditors' opinion useful. Both credit and financial analysts see the credibility of financial statements to be a function of the size of the auditing firm. Both groups assume that the characteristics of Big-Four firms allow them to produce better-quality reports than non-Big firms. Non-audit services were found to affect auditor's independence and hence impair audit quality. Both the groups of analysts believe that effective audit committee enhances the quality of audit reports. Financial analysts perceive financial statements to be more credible than do credit analysts.     

Misstatement Direction, Litigation Risk, and Planned Audit Investment

This study reports the results of an experiment showing that auditor assessments of litigation risk and planned audit investments are higher when potential errors overstate financial performance than when those errors understate performance. This result is much stronger in the presence of high levels of litigation risk in the client's industry. These results suggest that in industries where litigation risk is high audited financial statements may contain more unintentional material understatement errors than overstatement errors. Thus, litigation risk—through its effect on auditors—may encourage financial statements that understate firm performance     

Reputation concerns and herd behavior of audit committees - A corporate governance problem

This paper offers an explanation for audit committee failures within a corporate governance context. The management of a firm sets up financial statements that are possibly biased. These statements are audited/reviewed by an external auditor and by an audit committee. Both agents report the result of their work, the auditor acting first. Both use an imperfect technology that results in a privately observed signal regarding the quality of financial statements. The audit committee as well as the auditor are anxious to build up reputation in the labor market. Given this predominant goal they report on the signal in order to maximize the market’s assessment of their ability. At the end of the game the true character of the financial statements is revealed to the public with some positive probability. The market uses this information along with the agents’ reports to update beliefs about the agents’ abilities. We show that a herding equilibrium exists in which the audit committee “herds” and follows the auditor’s judgement no matter what its own insights suggest. This result holds even if the audit committee members are held liable for detected failure. However, performance based bonus payments induce truthful reporting at least in some cases.     

Explaining qualifications in audit reports using a support vector machine methodology

The verification of whether the financial statements of a firm represent its actual position is of major importance for auditors, who should provide a qualified report if they conclude that the financial statements fail to meet this requirement. This paper implements support vector machines (SVMs) to develop models that may support auditors in this task. Linear and non‐linear models are developed and their performance is analysed using training samples of different size and out‐of‐sample/out‐of‐time data. The results show that all SVM models are capable of distinguishing between qualified and unqualified financial statements with satisfactory accuracy. The performance of the models over time is also explored. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

会计职能·财务报告性质·财务报告体系重构

本文针对次贷危机以来会计领域关于非历史成本会计的讨论与争论,从会计职能与会计目标的讨论切入,提出会计的核心价值仍然是维系人类社会的相互信任。在此基础上,论文提出重构多重目标的财务报告模式,其中,基本财务报表仍然以历史成本为基础,满足经济社会信任需求;其它财务报告"按需订制",满足不同使用者的差异化需求,可以采用非历史成本计量属性。     

Hierarchical GARCH

There is strong empirical evidence that the GARCH estimates obtained from panels of financial time series cluster. In order to capture this empirical regularity, this paper introduces the Hierarchical GARCH (HG) model. The HG is a nonlinear panel specification in which the coefficients of each series are modeled as a function of observed series characteristic and an unobserved random effect. A joint panel estimation strategy is proposed to carry out inference for the model. A simulation study shows that when there is a strong degree of coefficient clustering panel estimation leads to substantial accuracy gains in comparison to estimating each GARCH individually. The HG is applied to a panel of U.S. financial institutions in the 2007–2009 crisis, using firm size and leverage as characteristics. Results show evidence of coefficient clustering and that the characteristics capture a significant portion of cross sectional heterogeneity. An out-of-sample volatility forecasting application shows that when the sample size is modest coefficient estimates based on the panel estimation approach perform better than the ones based on individual estimation.     

论企业财务报告的性质及其信息的基本特征

本文研究主体(企业)财务报告的性质与特征,本研究必须区别财务报表和其他财务报告(含财务报表附注),中心和核心信息是由财务报表提供的,而外围和补充信息则由其他财务报告提供。上述财务报告的两部分的性质与特征有一些差别。财务报表是以过去的交易和事项为基础,是以有力的客观而可稽核的证据来支撑,它必须遵照会计准则并经过注册会计师的审计。所有涉及编制财务报表的会计程序都是确认与计量的运用,财务报表的内容仅限于财务报表要素,因此财务报表表述实际的事实。在很大程度上,提供一家企业经济活动,确切描绘的图像。相反,其他财务报告是以报告日为基础,而不是以交易和事项为基础,它运用估计、判断和模型,在很大程度上捕捉不确定性,这些不确定性可能提供财务和其他经济信息有助于使用者作出决策。总之,这两个部分都是完全必需的。但是在财务报告中,报表是中心,其他财务报告则是补充。     

Board meetings,committee structure,and firm value

In this study, we examine the determinants of board monitoring activity and its impact on firm value for a broad panel of firms over a six-year period from 1999 to 2005. During this period, Congress and the exchanges promulgated regulations that increased pressure upon firms for more independent and active boards. Economists have debated whether board activity and externally imposed regulations benefit or harm firms. We develop and examine several proxies for board monitoring and examine the relationship between board monitoring activity, firm characteristics, and firm value in a structural equation framework. One set of our proxies is based on the number of annual board and Audit Committee meetings. We show that prior performance, firm characteristics and governance characteristics are important determinants of board activity. We also show that the board monitoring is driven by corporate events, such as an acquisition or a restatement of financial statements. We find that board activity has a positive impact on firm value. Our results also indicate that the external pressure has had a salutary effect and recent regulations have led to some increase in firm value. A second set of proxies is based on the shift to a fully independent Audit, Compensation and Nominating Committees. We find that firms increased the independence of these Board committees following the enactment of the 2002 Sarbanes-Oxley Act.     

Accounting rules,equity valuation,and growth options

In a model with irreversible capacity investments, we show that financial statements prepared under replacement cost accounting provide investors with sufficient information for equity valuation purposes. Under alternative accounting rules, including historical cost and value in use accounting, investors will generally not be able to value precisely a firm’s growth options and therefore its equity. For these accounting rules, we describe the range of valuations that is consistent with the firm’s financial statements. We further show that replacement cost accounting preserves all value-relevant information if the firm’s investments are reversible. However, the directional relation between the value of the firm’s equity and the replacement cost of its assets is different from that in the setting with irreversible investments.