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Politicians frequently intervene in the regulation of financial accounting. Evidence from the accounting literature shows that regulatory capture by special interests helps explain these interventions. However, many accounting rules have broad economic or social consequences, such as their effects on income distribution or private sector subsidies. The perception of these consequences varies with a politician's ideology. Therefore, if accounting rules produce those consequences, ideology plausibly spills over and explains a politician's stance on the technical accounting issue, beyond special interest pressure. We use two prominent U.S. political debates about fair value accounting and the expensing of employee stock options to disentangle the role of ideology from special interest pressure. In both debates, ideology explains politicians' involvement at exactly those points when the debate focuses on the economic consequences of accounting regulation (i.e., bank bailouts and top management compensation). Once the debates focus on more technical issues, connections to special interests remain the dominant force. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We examine how U.S. individuals respond to regulation intended to reduce offshore tax evasion. The Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA) requires foreign financial institutions to report information to the U.S. government regarding U.S. account holders. We first document an average $7.8 billion to $15.3 billion decrease in equity foreign portfolio investment to the United States from tax‐haven countries after FATCA implementation, consistent with a decrease in "round‐tripping" investments attributable to U.S. investors' offshore tax evasion. When testing total worldwide investment out of financial accounts in tax havens post‐FATCA, we find an average decline of $56.6 billion to $78.0 billion. We next provide evidence of other important consequences of this regulation, including increased expatriations of U.S. citizens and greater investment in alternative assets not subject to FATCA reporting, such as residential real estate and artwork. Our study contributes to both the academic literature and policy analysis on regulation, tax evasion, and crime. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We use a machine learning technique to assess whether the thematic content of financial statement disclosures (labeled topic) is incrementally informative in predicting intentional misreporting. Using a Bayesian topic modeling algorithm, we determine and empirically quantify the topic content of a large collection of 10‐K narratives spanning 1994 to 2012. We find that the algorithm produces a valid set of semantically meaningful topics that predict financial misreporting, based on samples of Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) enforcement actions (Accounting and Auditing Enforcement Releases [AAERs]) and irregularities identified from financial restatements and 10‐K filing amendments. Our out‐of‐sample tests indicate that topic significantly improves the detection of financial misreporting by as much as 59% when added to models based on commonly used financial and textual style variables. Furthermore, models that incorporate topic significantly outperform traditional models when detecting serious revenue recognition and core expense errors. Taken together, our results suggest that the topics discussed in annual report filings and the attention devoted to each topic are useful signals in detecting financial misreporting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We study how the interplay of disclosure and regulation shapes capital allocation in reward crowdfunding. Using data from Kickstarter, the largest online reward crowdfunding platform, we show that, even in the absence of clear regulation and enforcement mechanisms, disclosure helps entrepreneurs access capital for their projects and bolsters engagement with potential project backers, consistent with the notion that disclosure mitigates moral hazard. We further document that, subsequent to a change in Kickstarter's terms of use that increases the threat of consumer litigation, the association between project funding and disclosure becomes stronger. This evidence suggests that consumer protection regulation enhances the perceived credibility of disclosure. We find the effect of the change in terms of use to be more pronounced in states with stricter consumer protection regulations. Taken together, our findings yield important insights on the role of disclosure, as well as on the potential effects of increased regulation on crowdfunding platforms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We analyze data made available through the PCAOB (Public Company Accounting Oversight Board) to provide descriptive evidence on the properties of auditors' actual quantitative materiality judgments and the implications of those judgments for financial reporting. Auditors' quantitative materiality judgments do not appear to result simply from applying conventional rules of thumb (e.g., 5% of pretax income), but instead are associated with size‐related financial statement outcomes (income, revenues, and assets), where the relative importance of the size‐related outcomes varies with client characteristics such as financial performance. Using the distribution of actual materiality amounts reported by auditors to the PCAOB as part of the audit‐inspection process, we construct a materiality‐judgment measure that locates a specific materiality amount within a normal range that is both comparable across varying client characteristics and supported by guidance in audit firm internal policy manuals. We find that looser materiality (an amount closer to the high end of a normal materiality range) is associated with fewer audit hours and lower audit fees, supporting the construct validity of this measure. We also find that looser materiality is associated with lower amounts of proposed audit adjustments and, in extreme cases, with a greater incidence of restatements, highlighting the importance of auditor materiality assessments for financial reporting reliability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper uses three alternating changes in hedge fund regulation to study whether regulation reduces hedge funds' misreporting, and, if so, why regulation is effective. Relative to public companies, hedge fund regulation is relatively light. Much of the regime is a "comply‐or‐explain" framework that allows funds to forego compliance with governance rules, providing that they disclose their lack of compliance. The results show that regulation reduces misreporting at hedge funds. Further analysis suggests that the disclosure requirements led funds to make changes in their internal governance, such as hiring or switching the fund's auditor, and that these changes induced funds to report their financial performance more accurately. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How do U.S. companies respond to incentives intended to encourage domestic manufacturing? I study the Domestic Production Activities Deduction (DPAD), which was enacted in the American Jobs Creation Act (AJCA) of 2004 and was the third largest U.S. corporate tax expenditure as of 2017. Using confidential data from the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis, I find greater average domestic investment spending of $95.5–$143.6 million, but only within the sample of domestic‐only firms and not until 2010, when the greatest statutory DPAD benefits were available. Additional evidence suggests that U.S. multinational claimants invest abroad rather than in the United States and that the increased investment by DPAD firms is accompanied by a reduction in the domestic workforce, consistent with a substitution of capital for labor. I also show that the delayed investment response is due to firms engaging in other responses first, such as changing corporate reporting to shift income across time and borders. Quantifying the extent of these effects contributes to the literature that studies this tax deduction and informs policy makers as to the effectiveness of both manufacturing incentives and U.S. corporate income tax rate reductions in stimulating real domestic activity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the effect of market participants' information processing costs on firms' disclosure choice. Using the recent eXtensible Business Reporting Language (XBRL) regulation, I find that firms increase their quantitative footnote disclosures upon implementation of XBRL detailed tagging requirements designed to reduce information users' processing costs. These results hold in a difference‐in‐difference design using matched nonadopting firms as controls, as well as two additional identification strategies. Examination of the disclosure increase by footnote type suggests that both regulatory and nonregulatory market participants play a role in monitoring firm disclosures. Overall, these findings suggest that the processing costs of market participants can be significant enough to impact firms' disclosure decisions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Gatekeepers in financial markets have the power to provide the institutional stability, fortitude, and direction necessary for the development and the smooth functioning of capital markets. At the same time, they are often motivated by their own private incentives. This along with the tradeoffs they face, and the at‐times unintended consequences of the regulations they propose and enforce, can undermine their effectiveness. A thorough understanding of gatekeepers and their roles can thus illuminate academics, the financial community, and regulators on how such gatekeepers can be the most effective and generate the greatest benefits for capital markets. Since gatekeeping roles and the literature they have inspired encompass a wide array of institutions and agencies, our overview concentrates on those that the conference papers appearing in this volume focus on. We conclude that collectively, the papers contribute to significant progress, and point out some crucial areas that call for further investigation and offer opportunities for future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines whether requiring the disclosure of audited financial statements disciplines managers' mergers and acquisitions (M&As) decisions. When an M&A transaction meets certain disclosure thresholds, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) requires the public acquirer to disclose the target's audited financial statements after the merger is completed. Using hand‐collected data, I find that the disclosure of private targets' financial statements is associated with better acquisition decisions. Furthermore, I find that this disciplining effect of disclosure is more pronounced when monitoring by outside capital providers is more difficult and costly, and when other disciplining mechanisms are weaker. Finally, these findings are robust to several alternative explanations, such as monitoring from blockholders and voluntary disclosures. In sum, the evidence suggests that the ex post mandatory disclosure of private targets' accounting information disciplines managers' acquisition decisions and improves acquisition efficiency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A widely held assumption in policy making and empirical research is that increasing the strength of public enforcement improves financial reporting quality and audit quality. This paper provides a more nuanced view. In a model with a manager who can manage earnings, a strategic auditor, and an enforcement institution, we show that enforcement and auditing are complements in a weak enforcement regime but can be substitutes in a strong regime. Although stronger enforcement always mitigates earnings management, the effects of different instruments of strengthening enforcement are ambiguous. We show that they can improve or impair financial reporting quality and audit quality, depending on production risk, accounting system characteristics, and the scope of auditing relative to enforcement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT: Researchers frequently proxy for managers’ non‐GAAP disclosures using performance metrics available through analyst forecast data providers (FDPs), such as I/B/E/S. The extent to which FDP‐provided earnings are a valid proxy for managers’ non‐GAAP reporting, however, has been debated extensively. We explore this important question by creating the first large‐sample data set of managers’ non‐GAAP earnings disclosures, which we directly compare to I/B/E/S data. Although we find a substantial overlap between the two data sets, we also find that they differ in systematic ways because I/B/E/S (1) excludes managers’ lower quality non‐GAAP numbers and (2) sometimes provides higher quality non‐GAAP measures that managers do not explicitly disclose. Our results indicate that using I/B/E/S to identify managers’ non‐GAAP disclosures significantly underestimates the aggressiveness of their reporting choices. We encourage researchers interested in managers’ non‐GAAP reporting to use our newly available data set of manager‐disclosed non‐GAAP metrics because it more accurately captures managers’ reporting choices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT: This study examines the incremental information in loss firms’ non‐GAAP earnings disclosures relative to GAAP earnings. Using a large sample obtained through textual analysis and hand‐collection, we posit and find that loss firms’ non‐GAAP earnings exclusions offset the low informativeness of GAAP losses for forecasting and valuation. Loss firms’ non‐GAAP earnings are highly predictive of future performance and are valued by investors, while the expenses excluded from GAAP earnings are not. Additional tests suggest that loss firms disclosing non‐GAAP profits have significantly better future performance than GAAP‐only loss firms and are not overvalued by investors. Comparing non‐GAAP earnings of profitable firms to those of loss firms, we find that loss firms’ non‐GAAP metrics are significantly more predictive and less strategic. We conclude that non‐GAAP earnings disclosures are particularly informative about loss firms and help investors disaggregate losses into components that have differential implications for forecasting and valuation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT: In collaboration with the Authority for the Financial Markets in the Netherlands, we manipulate the content of official letters that instruct financial intermediaries to submit a mandatory self‐assessment. As part of the Registered Report Process, we submitted our hypotheses, experimental procedure, and planned statistical analyses before data collection. We predicted that a request indicating a supportive regulatory attitude has a positive effect on reporting quality on average. We also predicted this effect to be stronger for small firms and for firms with a long‐term orientation, and to become negative for firms with a short‐term orientation. Planned analyses show that a supportive letter reduced reporting quality unless firms had a long‐term orientation, supporting the moderating influence of time horizon, but providing no support for the expected average effect or for moderation by firm size. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT: Are regulatory interventions delayed reactions to market failures or can regulators proactively pre‐empt corporate misbehavior? From a public interest view, we would expect “effective” regulation to ex ante mitigate agency conflicts between corporate insiders and outsiders, and prevent corporate misbehavior from occurring or quickly rectify transgressions. However, regulators are also self‐interested and may be captured, uninformed, or ideological, and become less effective as a result. In this registered report, we develop a historical time series of corporate (accounting) scandals and (accounting) regulations for a panel of 26 countries from 1800 to 2015. An analysis of the lead‐lag relations at both the global and individual country level yields the following insights: (1) Corporate scandals are an antecedent to regulation over long stretches of time, suggesting that regulators are typically less flexible and informed than firms. (2) Regulation is positively related to the incidence of future scandals, suggesting that regulators are not fully effective, that explicit rules are required to identify scandalous corporate actions, or that new regulations have unintended consequences. (3) There exist systematic differences in these lead‐lag relations across countries and over time, suggesting that the effectiveness of regulation is shaped by fundamental country characteristics like market development and legal tradition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT: Whistleblowers are ostensibly a valuable resource to regulators investigating securities violations, but whether there is a link between whistleblower involvement and the outcomes of enforcement actions is unclear. Using a data set of employee whistleblowing allegations obtained from the U.S. government and the universe of enforcement actions for financial misrepresentation, we find that whistleblower involvement is associated with higher monetary penalties for targeted firms and employees and with longer prison sentences for culpable executives. We also find that regulators more quickly begin enforcement proceedings when whistleblowers are involved. Our findings suggest that whistleblowers are a valuable source of information for regulators who investigate and prosecute financial misrepresentation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT: I exploit variation in the adoption of disclosure and supervisory regulation across U.S. states to examine their impact on the development and stability of commercial banks. The empirical results suggest that the adoption of state‐level requirements to report financial statements in local newspapers is associated with greater stability and development of commercial banks. I also examine which political constituencies influence the adoption of disclosure and supervisory regulation. I find that powerful landowners and small private banks are associated with late adoption of these regulations. These findings suggest that incumbent groups oppose disclosure rules because the passage of such rules threatens their private interests. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We experimentally study the deception detection capabilities of experienced auditors, using CEO narratives from earnings conference calls as case materials. We randomly assign narratives of fraud and nonfraud companies to auditors as well as the presence versus absence of an instruction explaining that cognitive dissonance in speech is helpful for detecting deception. We predict this instruction will weaken auditors' learned tendency to overlook fraud cues. We find that auditors' deception judgments are less accurate for fraud companies than for nonfraud companies, unless they receive this instruction. We also find that instructed auditors more extensively describe red flags for fraud companies and more accurately identify specific sentences in narratives that pertain to underlying frauds. These findings indicate that instructing experienced auditors to be alert for cognitive dissonance in CEO narratives can activate deception detection capabilities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We use historical particularities of pension funding law to investigate whether managers of U.S. corporate defined benefit pension plan sponsors strategically use regulatory freedom to lower the reported value of pension liabilities, and hence required cash contributions. For some years, pension plans were required to estimate two liabilities--one with mandated discount rates and mortality assumptions, and another where these could be chosen freely. Using a sample of 11,963 plans, we find that the regulated liability exceeds the unregulated measure by 10% and the difference further increases for underfunded pension plans. Underfunded plans tend to assume substantially higher discount rates and lower life expectancy. The effect persists both in the cross-section of plans and over time and it serves to reduce cash contributions. We further show that plan sponsor managers use the freed-up cash for corporate investment and that credit risk is unlikely to explain the finding. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2013, a new law required Indian firms, which satisfy certain profitability, net worth, and size thresholds, to spend at least 2% of their net income on corporate social responsibility (CSR). We exploit this regulatory change to isolate the shareholder value implications of CSR activities. Using an event study approach coupled with a regression discontinuity design, we find that the law, on average, caused a 4.1% drop in the stock price of firms forced to spend money on CSR. However, firms that spend more on advertising are not negatively affected by the mandatory CSR rule. These results suggest that firms voluntarily choose CSR to maximize shareholder value. Therefore, forcing a firm to spend on CSR is likely to be sub-optimal for the firm with a consequent negative impact on shareholder value. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Errors and bias are both inherent features of accounting. In theory, while errors discourage bias by lowering the value relevance of accounting, they can also facilitate bias by providing camouflage. Consistent with theory, we find a hump-shaped relation between a firm's propensity to engage in intentional misstatement and the prevalence of unintentional misstatements in the firm's industry for the whole economy and a majority of the industries. The result is robust to using firms' number of items in financial statements and exposure to complex accounting rules as alternative proxies for errors and to using the restatement amount in net income to quantify the magnitude of bias and errors. To directly test for the two effects of errors, we show that when errors are more prevalent, the market reacts less to firms' earnings surprises and bias is more difficult to detect. Our results highlight the imperfectness of accounting, advance understanding of firms' reporting incentives, and shed light on accounting standard setting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT We investigate whether Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (PCAOB) inspections affect the quality of internal control audits. Our research design improves on prior studies by exploiting both cross-sectional and time-series variation in the content of PCAOB inspection reports, while also controlling for audit firm and year fixed effects, effectively achieving a difference-in-differences research design. We find that when PCAOB inspectors report higher rates of deficiencies in internal control audits, auditors respond by increasing the issuance of adverse internal control opinions. We also find that auditors issue more adverse internal control opinions to clients with concurrent misstatements, who thus genuinely warrant adverse opinions. We further find that higher inspection deficiency rates lead to higher audit fees, consistent with PCAOB inspections prompting auditors to undertake costly remediation efforts. Taken together, our results are consistent with the PCAOB inspections improving the quality of internal control audits by prompting auditors to remediate deficiencies in their audits of internal controls. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT This paper examines earnings management by EU firms that initiate an antidumping investigation. We first document economically and statistically significant income-decreasing earnings management around the initiation of an antidumping investigation. We show that earnings management increases when accounting data directly affect the magnitude of the tariffs imposed in the trade investigation. We also find that earnings management decreases as the number of petitioning firms increases or as the distance between petitioning firms increases, suggesting free-rider and coordination problems. We find that earnings management increases when the petition is directed at a country that imports more goods from the petitioning firm's home country, suggesting that retaliation threats affect incentives. We document that raising equity or debt financing moderates income-decreasing earnings management, consistent with the idea that sample firms trade off capital market and regulatory considerations. Our results indicate that contemporary research methods can detect accruals-based earnings management in settings in which the incentives for earnings management can be clearly identified. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT We examine uniform and discretionary regimes for reporting information about firm performance from the perspective of a standard setter, in a setting where the precision of reported information is difficult to verify and the reported information can help coordinate decisions by users of the information. The standard setter's task is to choose a reporting regime to maximize the expected decision value of reported information for all users at all firms. The uniform regime requires all firms to report using the same set of reporting methods regardless of the precision of their information, and the discretionary regime allows firms to freely condition their sets of reporting methods on the precision of their information. We show that when unverifiable information precision varies across firms and users' decisions based on reported information have strong strategic complementarities, a uniform regime can have a beneficial social effect as compared to a discretionary reporting regime. Our analysis generates both normative and positive implications for evaluating the necessity and effectiveness of reporting under standards. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT Standard setters explicitly state that disclosure should not substitute for recognition in financial reports. Consistent with this directive, prior research shows that investors find recognized values more pertinent than disclosed values. However, it remains unclear whether reporting items are recognized because they are more relevant for investing decisions, or whether requiring recognition itself prompts differing behavior on the part of firms and investors. Using the setting of subsequent events, I identify the differential effect of requiring disclosure versus recognition in a setting where the accounting treatment of an item is exogenously determined. For comparable events, I find a stronger initial market response for firms required to recognize relative to firms that must disclose, although the large magnitude of the identified effect calls into question whether this difference can be attributed to accounting treatments alone. In examining various reasons for the stronger market response to recognized values, I fail to find support for the hypothesis that this difference is due to differential reliability of disclosed and recognized values. I do find some evidence that investors underreact to disclosed events, consistent with investors incurring higher processing costs when using disclosed information. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT We study how public and private disclosure requirements interact to influence both tax regulator enforcement and firm disclosure. To capture IRS enforcement activities, we introduce a novel data set of IRS acquisition of firms' public financial disclosures, which we label IRS attention. We examine the implementation of two new disclosure requirements that potentially alter IRS attention: FIN 48, which increased public tax disclosure requirements, and Schedule UTP, which increased private tax disclosure. We find that IRS attention increased following FIN 48 but subsequently decreased following Schedule UTP, consistent with public and private disclosure interacting to influence tax enforcement. We next examine how private tax disclosure requirements under Schedule UTP affected firms' public disclosure responses. We find that, following Schedule UTP, firms significantly increased the quantity and altered the content of their tax-related disclosures, consistent with lower tax-related proprietary costs of disclosure. Our results suggest that changes in SEC disclosure requirements altered the IRS's behavior with regard to public information acquisition, and, relatedly, changes in IRS private disclosure requirements appear to change firms' public disclosure behavior. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT Hybrid financial instruments contain features of both liabilities and equity. Standard setters continue to struggle with 'getting the classification right' for these complex instruments. In this paper, we experimentally test whether the features of hybrid instruments affect the credit-related judgments of experienced finance professionals, even when the hybrid instruments are already classified as liabilities or equity. Our results suggest that getting the classification right is not of primary importance for these experienced users, as they largely rely on the underlying features of the instrument to make their judgments. A second experiment shows that experienced users' reliance on features generalizes to several features that often characterize hybrid instruments. However, we also find that experienced users vary in their beliefs about which individual features are most important in distinguishing between liabilities and equity. Together, our results highlight the importance of effective disclosure of hybrid instruments' features. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT Effective consultation is critical for improving the audit of estimates. In an experiment where audit managers acted as consultants to other auditors, we examine conditions in which consultants either recommend estimates that differ substantially from advice-seekers' assessments (contrariness) or recommend narrower reasonable ranges of estimates (precision). Psychology theory argues that both of these attributes can improve estimates. We examine whether these attributes depend on consultants' status motives, that is, the desire to gain respect from or power over others. We find that active status motives lead consultants with higher specialized knowledge to provide recommendations that are less contrary, but more precise. However, consultants increase precision by tightening range bounds in a manner that is not counter to management's preference and thus unlikely to prompt the audit team to challenge the estimate. We also find that higher consultant decision authority constrains precision. Our findings suggest limits to consultation's potential effectiveness in improving estimates. For instance, our findings suggest that firms and standard setters direct consultants to focus scrutiny on the range bound that is most likely to constrain management opportunism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT Despite debate on the desirability of rules-based standards, no studies provide evidence on why accounting standards take on rules-based characteristics. We identify and test five theories from prior research (litigation risk, constraining opportunism, complexity, transaction frequency, and age) that could explain why some U.S. accounting standards contain rules-based characteristics. Litigation risk and complexity are most consistently related to cross-sectional and time-series variation in rules-based characteristics. We find more limited evidence that frequent transactions, age, and desires by regulators to constrain opportunistic reporting are related to rules-based standards. We note, however, that our findings are necessarily descriptive because standards arise endogenously from market and political forces, limiting causal interpretation. Further, it is difficult to perfectly separate rules-based characteristics of the standard from both the complexity of the standard and the characteristics of the underlying transaction, including the complexity of the transaction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT The use of accounting measures and disclosures in banks' contracts and regulation suggests that the quality of banks' financial reporting is central to the efficacy of market discipline and nonmarket mechanisms in limiting banks' development of debt and risk overhangs in economic good times and in mitigating the adverse consequences of those overhangs for the stability of the financial system in downturns. This essay examines how research on banks' financial reporting, informed by the financial economics literature on banking, can generate insights about how to enhance the stability of the financial system. We begin with a foundational discussion of how aspects of banks' accounting and disclosures may affect stability. We then evaluate representative papers in the empirical literature on banks' financial reporting and stability, pointing out the research design issues that empirical accounting researchers need to confront to develop well-specified tests able to generate reliably interpretable findings. To this end, we provide examples of settings amenable to addressing these issues. We conclude with considerations for accounting standard setters and financial system policy makers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT This study shows that the Securities and Exchange Commission's (SEC) enforcement intensity toward the foreign firms under its jurisdiction has increased dramatically over the past two decades. Because enforcement events signify an increased threat of future enforcement, I examine the stock returns of foreign firms not targeted by the SEC during windows around enforcement actions that target foreign firms. This design captures the net effects of public enforcement and helps to rule out omitted variables as alternative explanations, because other factors would have to align with enforcement events that do not occur in an obvious pattern (and are therefore unlikely to map onto other news). Nontarget firms experience positive stock returns during the event windows, which is consistent with enforcement constraining the risks of expropriation. The cross-sectional pattern in returns reveals greater returns for firms from weak home legal environments. Finally, consistent with the market adjusting to a new enforcement regime, the magnitude of event returns declines over time. Overall, SEC enforcement is associated with increases in the value of foreign firms, supporting the premise of the legal bonding hypothesis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The audit market's unique combination of features-its role in capital market transparency, mandated demand, and concentrated supply-means it receives considerable attention from policy makers. We explore the effects of two market scenarios that have been the focus of policy discussions: mandatory audit firm rotation and further supply concentration due to the exit of a 'Big 4' audit firm. To do so, we first estimate publicly traded firms' demand for auditing services, allowing the services provided by each of the Big 4 to be differentiated products. We then use those estimates to calculate how each scenario would affect client firms' consumer surplus. We estimate that, for U.S. publicly trade firms, mandatory audit firm rotation would induce consumer surplus losses of approximately $2.7 billion if rotation were required after 10 years and $4.7-5.0 billion if after only four years. We find similarly that exit by one of the Big 4 would reduce client firms' surplus by $1.4-1.8 billion. These estimates reflect only the value of firms' lost options to hire the exiting audit firm; they do not include likely fee increases resulting from less competition among audit firms. The latter could result in audit fee increases between $0.75-1.3 billion per year for mandatory rotation and $0.47-0.58 billion per year for the disappearance of a Big 4 audit firm. Such losses are substantial; by comparison, total audit fees for public firms were $11 billion in 2010. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates whether foreign institutional investors affect the global convergence of financial reporting practices. Using several measures of reporting convergence, we show that U.S. institutional ownership is positively associated with subsequent changes in emerging market firms' accounting comparability to their U.S. industry peers. We identify this association using an instrumental variable approach that exploits exogenous variation in U.S. institutional investment generated by the JGTRRA Act of 2003. Further, we provide evidence of a specific mechanism-the switch to a Big Four audit firm-through which U.S. institutional investors affect reporting convergence. Finally, we show that, for emerging market firms, an increase in comparability to U.S. firms is associated with an improvement in the properties of foreign analysts' forecasts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigates why countries mandate accruals in the definition of corporate taxable income. Accruals alleviate timing and matching problems in cash flows, which smoothes taxable income and thus better aligns it with underlying economic performance. These accrual properties can be desirable in the tax setting as tax authorities seek more predictable corporate tax revenues. However, they can also make tax revenues procyclical by increasing the correlation between aggregate corporate tax revenues and aggregate economic activity. We argue that accruals shape the distribution of corporate tax revenues, which leads regulators to incorporate accruals into the definition of taxable income to balance the portfolio of government revenues and expenditures. Using a sample of 26 OECD countries, we find support for several theoretically motivated factors explaining the use of accruals in tax codes. We first provide evidence that corporate tax revenues are less volatile in high accrual countries, but high accrual countries collect relatively higher (lower) tax revenues when the corporate sector grows (contracts). Critically, we then show that accruals and smoother tax revenues are favored by countries with higher levels of government spending on public services and uncertain future expenditures, while countries with procyclical other tax collections favor cash rules and lower procyclicality of corporate tax revenues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]