Examining the disclosures on the websites of English credit unions

This paper examines the disclosures made on English credit unions’ websites. Credit unions without a website are presumed to be small. Community credit unions with websites tend to offer basic services with a limited range of products that may appeal to poorer members of society. Occupational credit unions appear more likely to have a greater range of products.     

Burnout among university accounting educators in Australia and New Zealand: determinants and implications

Increased teaching workloads combined with pressures to publish in limited outlets has intensified the burnout potential among accounting educators in Australia and New Zealand. However, amongst the few studies on tertiary accounting education, the focus has so far been only on burnout arising from student contact intensity. We broaden this literature by examining how other worklife characteristics contribute to burnout. Based on 158 responses from Australian and New Zealand accounting academics, we find evidence for emotional exhaustion due to high workload. However, professional efficacy continues to remain high. Qualitative responses offer deeper insights on how various burnout factors are interrelated.     

Classical meets modern in the IDEA protocol for structured expert judgement

Expert judgement is pervasive in all forms of risk analysis, yet the development of tools to deal with such judgements in a repeatable and transparent fashion is relatively recent. This work outlines new findings related to an approach to expert elicitation termed the IDEA protocol. IDEA combines psychologically robust interactions among experts with mathematical aggregation of individual estimates. In particular, this research explores whether communication among experts adversely effects the reliability of group estimates. Using data from estimates of the outcomes of geopolitical events, we find that loss of independence is relatively modest and it is compensated by improvements in group accuracy.     

Regression Modeling for the Valuation of Large Variable Annuity Portfolios

Variable annuities are insurance products that contain complex guarantees. To manage the financial risks associated with these guarantees, insurance companies rely heavily on Monte Carlo simulation. However, using Monte Carlo simulation to calculate the fair market values of these guarantees for a large portfolio of variable annuities is extremely time consuming. In this article, we propose the class of GB2 distributions to model the fair market values of guarantees to capture the positive skewness typically observed empirically. Numerical results are used to demonstrate and evaluate the performance of the proposed model in terms of accuracy and speed.     

Decomposing the market,industry, and firm components of profitability: implications for forecasts of profitability

Academics and practitioners frequently highlight that overall market and industry performance is an important aspect of a firm’s profitability. However, few studies allow for the decomposition of a firm’s profitability into market, industry, and idiosyncratic components, and those that do often assume that the market and industry components are cross-sectional constants. In this study, we allow for variation in firm-specific sensitivities to market, industry, and idiosyncratic economic shocks, and then assess whether and when this decomposition results in improved forecasts of profitability. For the overall sample, we find significant improvements in terms of the magnitude of forecast errors and the frequency with which forecasts based on the decomposed values are superior versus forecasts using only total profitability. Across the sample as a whole, decomposing profitability in the forecasting process results in more accurate forecasts greater than two-thirds of the time (increasing to almost 80% within certain subsamples). Our results provide strong support for the role that firm-specific measures of market and industry profitability play in predicting a firm’s future performance, as well as highlighting settings where the decomposition provides the greatest benefit in terms of predicting future changes in profitability.     

Debt contracts in the presence of performance manipulation

Empirical evidence suggests that firms often manipulate reported numbers to avoid debt covenant violations. We study how a firm’s ability to manipulate reports affects the terms of its debt contracts and the resulting investment and manipulation decisions that the firm implements. Our model generates novel empirical predictions regarding the use and the level of debt covenant, the interest rate, the efficiency of investment decisions, and the likelihood of covenant violations. For example, the model predicts that the optimal debt contract for firms with relatively strong (weak) corporate governance (i.e., cost of manipulation) induces overinvestment (underinvestment). Moreover, for firms with strong (weak) corporate governance, an increase in corporate governance quality leads to tighter (looser) covenant, more (less) frequent covenant violations and lower (higher) interest rate. Our model highlights that the interest rate, which is a common proxy for the cost of debt, neither accounts for the distortion of investment efficiency nor the expected manipulation costs arising under debt financing. We propose a measure of cost of debt capital that accounts for these effects.     

Audit personnel salaries and audit quality

This study examines the relation between audit personnel salaries and office-level audit quality. We measure audit personnel salaries at the associate, senior, and manager ranks for Big 4 audit offices from 2004 to 2013, using unique individual-auditor-level data obtained from the U.S. Department of Labor. We find that offices that pay lower salaries have a higher percentage of clients that experience restatements. In related analyses, we also find lower levels of audit quality when audit employees are paid less, relative to other lines of service in accounting firms. Finally, we document positive and significant associations between salary and fees, suggesting that audit offices pass some of the cost of higher labor onto their clients. Overall, our findings provide important initial evidence on the role of audit salary and its relation to audit quality and audit fees.     

<Emphasis Type="Bold">Measuring the market response to going concern modifications: the importance of disclosure timing</Emphasis>

Auditor going concern modifications (GCMs) are intended to provide market participants with information related to financial distress, and prior research suggests that the disclosure of a GCM elicits a substantial negative market reaction from investors. In this study, we investigate the market reaction to GCMs in a contemporary disclosure regime and consider whether the observed market reaction is confounded by other material disclosures. We find that the majority of GCMs are issued concurrently with earnings announcements (EAs) and that EAs in the year of new GCMs elicit large negative cumulative abnormal returns (CARs). We also find that CARs surrounding GCMs are significantly more negative when GCMs are disclosed with EAs versus following EAs. We then evaluate whether GCMs convey distress that is incremental to EA disclosures by measuring i) the market reaction to GCMs disclosed following EAs, and ii) whether EA CARs are substantially more negative for companies disclosing GCMs with EAs as opposed to after EAs. In both cases, we find that the incremental market response to GCMs is statistically weak and much smaller in economic magnitude than is suggested by prior research. Finally, we find that management disclosures in EAs, rather than the presence of a GCM, appear to convey information that investors use to anticipate bankruptcy. Taken together, these findings suggest that GCMs are confounded by other significant disclosures and that the informational benefits of GCM reporting are significantly smaller than previously thought.     

Societal trust and corporate tax avoidance

Using an international sample of firms from 25 countries and a country-level index for societal trust, we document that societal trust is negatively associated with tax avoidance, even after controlling for other institutional determinants, such as home country legal institutions and tax system characteristics. We explore the effects of two country-level institutional characteristics—strength of legal institutions and capital market pressure—on the relation between societal trust and tax avoidance. We find that the relation between trust and tax avoidance is less pronounced when the legal institutions in a country are stronger and is more pronounced when the capital market pressure is stronger. Finally, we examine the relation between societal trust and tax evasion, an extreme and illegal form of tax avoidance. We show that societal trust is negatively related to tax evasion and the negative relation is less pronounced when legal institutions are stronger.     

Auditor monitoring and verification in financial contracts: evidence from earnouts and SFAS 141(R)

We study how monitoring and verification of accounting-based performance benchmarks influences the design and efficiency of earnout contracts. Earnouts are commonly used to resolve agency conflicts arising in mergers and acquisitions, but these contracts create measurement and other agency problems when contingent payments are tied to future accounting-based performance. Exploiting changes in auditor monitoring of earnouts that arose as\ a consequence of SFAS 141(R), we find that acquisition contracts are more likely to incorporate accounting-based earnouts and that contingent payments tied to accounting-based performance benchmarks make up a larger portion of the consideration when acquiring firms have high-quality auditors. We also find that market reactions to announcements of earnout deals are more positive after SFAS 141(R) for acquisitions most susceptible to disputes over accounting-based performance metrics and these results are more pronounced for acquiring firms with high-quality auditors. By exploiting the features of this unique setting, we illuminate the role of monitoring and verification of accounting information in financial contracts.