Accounting - Research Publications
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ItemDoes a Liability of Foreignness in Liquidity Apply to US IPOs?(Taylor & Francis, 2022-11-30)We provide evidence regarding two unanswered and consequential questions regarding share trading liquidity, a primary motive for US listings, for the prominent listing cohort of foreign-firm US initial public offerings (FIPOs). First, we test whether FIPOs exhibit a ‘liability of foreignness (Bell et al. 2012) in liquidity’ (LFL) compared with matched domestic-firm IPOs (DIPOs), despite listing requirements that are more stringent than for the mature cross-listed foreign firms studied previously. Second, we test whether US IPO LFL is moderated by FIPO home country institutional attributes that promote liquidity. Our findings for 327 FIPOs from 36 countries between 1990 and 2012 reveal that US IPO LFL is moderated, but not eliminated, by FIPO home country attributes, thus indicating incomplete bonding with US institutions. These findings extend prior research and serve to inform foreign firms considering US IPOs, exchanges competing for them, listing facilitators, regulators, and investors regarding a salient listing consideration.
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ItemVoluntary versus mandatory disclosure of liability insurance coverage limit(Elsevier BV, 2022-11)This article analyzes the disclosure of the liability insurance coverage limit and the impact of mandating disclosure of the coverage limit in a setting where voluntary disclosure of a firm’s cash flow information is subject to litigation risk and the firm has directors’ and officers’ (D&O) liability insurance. Disclosure of cash flow information is costly, but disclosure of the insurance coverage limit features no direct disclosure friction. We find that, when the litigation environment is weak, the usual unraveling argument applies, and the manager always voluntarily discloses the coverage limit in equilibrium. However, when the litigation environment is strong, either no coverage limit is disclosed or only sufficiently high coverage limits are disclosed in equilibrium. Further analysis shows that mandatory disclosure of the coverage limit increases the voluntary disclosure of cash flow information.
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ItemGoing Concern Uncertainty: What Do Firms Disclose?(WILEY, 2022-07-09)
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ItemAltruism, social norms, and incentive contract design(SPRINGER, 2022-06-13)Abstract We study theoretically and empirically the relation between altruism and incentive contract design. Theoretically, we extend Fischer and Huddart (2008) to investigate how social norms reinforce managers’ altruistic preferences, thus affecting the optimal contract design related to incentive strength and performance measurement. Empirically, we draw on the notion of an organization’s work climate to capture managers’ altruistic preferences. Using data collected from a sample of 557 managers, we find that in a work climate where managers are mostly out for themselves, firms have lower pay-for-performance sensitivity and place a greater weight on aggregate performance measures. In addition, respondents report that they engage more in undesirable actions that are unproductive and costly to firm owners. In contrast, in a work climate where managers care about others (including peers in their organizational unit), firms place lower weights on aggregate performance measures. At the same time, respondents report that they supply more effort and engage less in undesirable actions.
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ItemShareholder Short-Termism, Corporate Control and Voluntary Disclosure(INFORMS, 2022-03-31)This paper examines how a manager uses voluntary disclosure to influence corporate control by a short-term shareholder. Because a short-term shareholder intervenes excessively, the manager’s disclosure strategy is determined by the trade-off between excessive and insufficient intervention. In equilibrium, when shareholder short-termism is not too high, the manager discloses both good and bad news and withholds intermediate news. Alternatively, when shareholder short-termism is high, the manager only discloses good news and withholds bad news. In both equilibria, withholding information is value-enhancing for the nondisclosing firms. We also show that the likelihood of disclosure weakly decreases as the shareholder is more short-term-oriented. Moreover, nondisclosing firms are more likely to face shareholder intervention than disclosing firms. This paper was accepted by Brian Bushee, accounting. Supplemental Material: The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2022.4357 .
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ItemCEO talent: A dime a dozen, or worth its weight in gold?(Wiley, 2018-06-01)Very little sophisticated research exists on the size, quality, and efficiency of the labor market for CEO talent. This paper sheds light on this labor market by considering the perspectives of directors directly responsible for hiring and firing the CEOs of the largest publicly traded corporations in the United States. We find that directors overwhelmingly believe that the CEO job is exceptionally challenging and only a handful of executives are qualified to run their company and others in their industry. This suggests that the labor market for outstanding CEO talent is significantly tighter and more competitive than governance experts might realize.
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ItemThe effect of inspections, rotations and client preferences on staffing decisions(Wiley, 2019-12-01)With increased regulatory focus on audits and concerns about whether audit regulation is achieving its stated aims, it is timely to investigate how regulator inspection of audit files and partner rotations may be affecting staffing decisions. This is an important issue, which affects all audits, as the calibre of staff allocated across engagements impacts the quality of audit work delivered. This study reports the results of an experiment where auditor participants allocate staff across two audits, where regulation anticipated (none, inspection, rotation) and a client request for the best staff (absent, present) are manipulated between-subjects. We find that auditors allocate lower calibre staff when neither an inspection nor rotation is anticipated than when either is anticipated. When an inspection is anticipated, auditors allocate staff with more knowledge and compliance skills. When a rotation is anticipated, auditors allocate staff with more people skills. A client request for the best staff only has an effect when a partner is due to be rotated, where auditors allocate staff with more people skills in response to the client request. Our findings provide greater understanding of staffing decisions, which may affect audit quality if concerns around audit inspections and partner rotations are perceived by auditors as more important than the underlying risk or complexity of an engagement when allocating staff.
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ItemLinguistic Complexity in Firm Disclosures: Obfuscation or Information?(WILEY, 2018-03-01)
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ItemGetting to Know You: Trust Formation in New Interfirm Relationships and the Consequences for Investments in Management Control and the Collaboration(Wiley, 2017-06)Trust is often posited to substitute for management control in interfirm transactions. However, this raises questions of how trust arises in new relationships, and whether trust that is not based on prior experience transacting together is sufficient to persuade managers to forgo investments in management controls. We use an experiment to test whether two features of the early stage of an interfirm relationship influence a buyer's initial trust in a supplier and have consequences for subsequent investments in management controls and in the collaboration. These two features are the autonomy of the buyer's manager to choose a supplier (i.e., delegation of decision-making authority) and the supplier's willingness to share information with the buyer. We find that the buyer manager's initial trust in the supplier is associated positively with both the autonomy to choose the supplier and the supplier's willingness to share information. Information content and supplier characteristics are held constant, so these results are novel and distinct from prior studies of the antecedents of trust. We find that higher initial trust is associated with reduced expenditures for management controls and increased investments in the collaboration. Thus, we conclude that delegation of decision-making authority and supplier information-sharing behavior in the early stages of a relationship influence the formation of initial trust, which has real consequences for investments in management control and in the collaboration.
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ItemAudit Quality for US-listed Chinese Companies(WILEY, 2017-07-01)