Journal of Accounting Research

ABSTRACT In December 2004, the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) mandated the use of a fair value-based measurement attribute to value employee stock options (ESOs) via Financial Accounting Standard (FAS) 123-R. In anticipation of FAS 123-R, between March 2004 and November 2005, several firms accelerate the vesting of ESOs to avoid recognizing existing unvested ESO grants at fair value in future financial statements. We find that the likelihood of accelerated vesting is higher if (1) acceleration has a greater effect on future ESO compensation expense, especially related to underwater options, and (2) firms suffer greater agency problems, proxied by fewer blockholders, lower pension fund ownership, and top five officers holding a greater share of ESOs. We also find a negative stock price reaction around the announcement of the acceleration decision. Furthermore, stock returns are significantly negative before the new vesting dates and positive afterward, suggesting that vesting dates could have been backdated. Copyright (c), University of Chicago on behalf of the Institute of Professional Accounting, 2008.

We investigate the effect of the Financial Accounting Standards Board's (FASB) new segment reporting standard on the information and monitoring environment. We compare hand-collected, restated SFAS 131 segment data for the final SFAS 14 fiscal year with the historical SFAS 14 data. We find that SFAS 131 increased the number of reported segments and provided more disaggregated information. Analysts and the market had access to a portion of the new segment information before it was made public, but analyst and market expectations were still altered by the mandated release of the new data. By increasing information disaggregation, the new standard induced firms to reveal previously "hidden" information about their diversification strategies. The newly revealed information affected market valuations and lead to changes in firm behavior consistent with improved monitoring following adoption of SFAS 131. Copyright University of Chicago on behalf of the Institute of Professional Accounting, 2003.

Beatty and Weber examine an accounting choice that managers made upon adoption of Statement of Financial Accounting Standards 142: whether to record a goodwill asset impairment as a cumulative effect of an accounting change at the time of adoption or delay the recognition of such an impairment to the future (perhaps indefinitely) when they would be recorded as expenses in earnings from continuing operations. The authors consider several factors that might influence management's reporting of transition effects, including contracting, equity market incentives, and regulatory forces. Participants at the 2005 Journal of Accounting Research Conference questioned whether such a complex accounting decision can be captured with simple linear models and noisy proxy variables, while also speculating upon whether the results would generalize to other settings. In this discussion, I summarize Beatty and Weber's research, highlight its contribution to the accounting literature, and provide a record of the main issues raised by the conference participants. Copyright University of Chicago on behalf of the Institute of Professional Accounting, 2006.

This study examines Statement of Financial Accounting Standards 142 adoption decisions, focusing on the trade-off between recording certain current goodwill impairment charges below the line and uncertain future impairment charges included in income from continuing operations. We examine several potentially important economic incentives that firms face when making this accounting choice. We find evidence suggesting that firms' equity market concerns affect their preference for above-the-line vs. below-the-line accounting treatment, and firms' debt contracting, bonus, turnover, and exchange delisting incentives affect their decisions to accelerate or delay expense recognition. Our study contributes to the accounting choice literature by examining managers' use of discretion when adopting a mandatory accounting change and by developing and testing explicit cross-sectional hypotheses of the determinants of firms' preferences for immediate below-the-line versus delayed above-the-line expense recognition. Copyright University of Chicago on behalf of the Institute of Professional Accounting, 2006.

Does taxation affect the timing of death? This is an interesting example of how behavior might be affected by economic incentives. We study how two changes in Swedish inheritance taxation 2003/04 and 2004/05 have affected mortality during the turns of the years. Our first main result is that deceased with estates taxable for legal heirs were 10 percentage points more likely to have died on New Year’s Day 2005, from when the inheritance tax was repealed, rather than on New Year’s Eve 2004, compared to deceased without taxable estates for legal heirs. The second main result is that deceased with estates taxable for a married spouse were 12 percentage points more likely to have died on New Year’s Day 2004, from when the inheritance tax between spouses was repealed, rather than on New Year’s Eve 2003, compared to deceased without taxable estates for a married spouse.

Using a sample of privately held C corporations and S corporations from the motor carrier industry during 1984-92, we assess the effect of the 1986 Tax Reform Act on the amount of corporate income shareholders of privately held C corporations shifted to their personal tax bases. We estimate that the C corporations shifted a mean of $130,587 taxable income each year to shareholders (representing 29 percent of their mean accounting earnings before income shifting) after the 1986 tax law change. The C corporations used deductible managerial compensation and rent expense, but not interest expense, to shift income to shareholders.

This article discusses the main contributions and findings of Hochberg, Sapienza and Vissing-Jorgensen's 'A Lobbying Approach to Evaluating the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002.' I offer a synopsis of the Journal of Accounting Research conference discussion of the paper as well as provide some broader perspectives on the two main lines of inquiry to which the paper contributes. The first perspective focuses on the impact of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX) and, in particular, how this study and others face the challenge of benchmarking of the price and quantity effects of the Act. I discuss the strengths and weaknesses of the authors' identification strategy that separates out firms whose insiders actively lobbied the Securities and Exchange Commission's rule-making process in the aftermath of SOX. The second perspective considers the motivations for and consequences of lobbying activity. I survey existing research in Economics, Accounting and Management which shows that lobbying propensity is predictable, confirms it is most likely to be conducted by agents most affected by the rule changes, but also warns that there are firm-specific, industry-specific, and even issue-specific factors that can complicate these interpretations.

Ramanna and Roychowdhury (2010) advance two interesting questions about the determinants of accounting discretion: Do firms use accounting discretion to mitigate the potential economic consequences of negative publicity? And, do firms’ political connections provide an additional motivation to use accounting discretion in the face of negative publicity? They explore the hypothesis that politically-connected firms become a liability to election candidates when voters discover that the firms have engaged in outsourcing jobs, and that firms attempt to mitigate the effects of negative publicity by managing earnings downward to lower their perceived profitability. Within a sample of politically-connected firms, the authors find that firms receiving greater negative publicity about job outsourcing are more likely to use negative accounting discretion. Although the authors emphasize the importance of firms’ political connections, the influence of negative publicity on accounting discretion more generally may well be the aspect of the paper with broadest interest to accounting researchers.

ABSTRACT We examine the accrual choices of outsourcing firms with links to U.S. congressional candidates during the 2004 elections, when corporate outsourcing was a major campaign issue. We find that politically connected firms with more extensive outsourcing activities have more income-decreasing discretionary accruals. Further, relative to adjacent periods, the evidence is concentrated in the two calendar quarters immediately preceding the 2004 election, consistent with heightened incentives for firms to manage earnings during the election season. The incentives can be attributed to donor firms' concerns about the potentially negative consequences of scrutiny over outsourcing for themselves and for their affiliated candidates. Copyright (c), University of Chicago on behalf of the Accounting Research Center, 2010.

ABSTRACT The American Jobs Creation Act of 2004 (the Act) creates a temporary tax holiday that effectively reduces the U.S. tax rate on repatriations from foreign subsidiaries from 35% to 5.25%. Firms receive the reduced tax rate by electing to take an 85% dividends received deduction on repatriations in 2004 or 2005. This paper investigates the characteristics of firms that repatriate under the Act and how they use the repatriated funds. We find that firms that repatriate under the Act have lower investment opportunities and higher free cash flows than nonrepatriating firms. Further, we find that repatriating firms increase share repurchases during 2005 by approximately $60 billion more than nonrepatriating firms, an amount that cannot be explained by differences in earnings between the two groups of firms. This increase represents about 20% of the $291.6 billion repatriated by our sample firms under the Act. Copyright (c), University of Chicago on behalf of the Accounting Research Center, 2009.

We investigate the extent to which income measurement by major early 20th-century U.S. railroads shows evidence of lower income smoothness and increased conservatism following new fixed asset accounting rules issued by the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC) in 1907 and 1908 and concurrent rate regulation regime shifts. Accounting rules promulgated by the ICC after the Hepburn Act of 1906 are the first accounting rules in U.S. history in which regulators could enforce such rules under federal law to increase compliance. Our samplewide results are more consistent with increased conservatism than with income smoothing. Additional tests indicate these effects are more pronounced for firms subject to more intense rate regulation by the ICC, which suggests that the tie-in between accounting regulation and product/service market regulation influences how managers respond to new accounting rules. Copyright University of Chicago on behalf of the Institute of Professional Accounting, 2003.

ABSTRACT We evaluate the manner in which sponsors of highly leveraged asset-backed commercial paper (ABCP) conduits responded to Financial Accounting Standards Board Interpretation No. 46 (FIN 46), "Consolidation of Variable Interest Entities an Interpretation of ARB No. 51", and its Canadian counterpart Accounting Standards Board of Accounting Guideline 15 (AcG-15), "Consolidation of Variable Interest Entities". By matching commercial paper investors with corporations seeking liquidity, ABCP sponsors facilitate a significant amount of short-term, securitized financing in the United States. FIN 46 and AcG-15 require sponsors to consolidate their ABCP conduits with their financial statements. We demonstrate that the volume of ABCP began to decline when FIN 46 was first proposed, and that this decline is primarily attributable to a reduction in North American banks' sponsorship of ABCP. We also demonstrate that North American banks entered into costly restructuring arrangements to avoid having to consolidate their conduits per the new accounting standards. Our results suggest that, in certain settings, accounting standards appear to have real effects on investment activity and product-market competition. Copyright (c), University of Chicago on behalf of the Institute of Professional Accounting, 2008.

ABSTRACT This paper investigates whether there are systematic differences between the forecasting style and abilities of female and male analysts, and whether market participants recognize these differences. My key conjecture is that only female analysts with superior forecasting abilities enter the profession due to a perception of discrimination in the analyst labor market. Consistent with this conjecture, I find that female analysts issue bolder and more accurate forecasts and their accuracy is higher in market segments in which their concentration is lower. Further, the stock market participants are aware of the male-female skill differences. They respond more strongly to the forecast revisions by female analysts even though those analysts get less media coverage. The short-term market reaction is incomplete, however, because it is followed by a strong post-revision drift. The perception of abilities is similar in the analyst labor market, where female analysts are more likely to move up to high-status brokerage firms, while their downward career mobility is lower. Collectively, these results indicate that female analysts have better-than-average skill due to self-selection and market participants are at least partially able to recognize their superior abilities. Copyright (c), University of Chicago on behalf of the Accounting Research Center, 2009.

We present data on privacy practices in e-commerce under the European Union's formal regulatory regime prevailing in the United Kingdom and compare it with the data from a previous study of U.S. practices that evolved in the absence of government laws or enforcement. The codification by the E.U. law, and the enforcement by the U.K. government, improves neither the disclosure nor the practice of e-commerce privacy relative to the United States. Regulation in the United Kingdom also appears to stifle development of a market for Web assurance services. Both U.S. and U.K. consumers continue to be vulnerable to a small number of e-commerce Web sites that spam their customers, ignoring the latter's expressed or implied preferences. These results raise important questions about finding a balance between enforced standards and conventions in financial reporting. In the second half of the 20th century, financial reporting has been characterized by both a preference for legislated standards and a lack of faith in its evolution as a body of social conventions. Evidence on whether this faith in standards over conventions is justified remains to be marshaled. Copyright University of Chicago on behalf of the Institute of Professional Accounting, 2005.

This study offers evidence on the earnings forecast bias analysts use to please firm management and the associated benefits they obtain from issuing such biased forecasts in the years prior to Regulation Fair Disclosure. Analysts who issue initial optimistic earnings forecasts followed by pessimistic earnings forecasts before the earnings announcement produce more accurate earnings forecasts and are less likely to be fired by their employers. The effect of such biased earnings forecasts on forecast accuracy and firing is stronger for analysts who follow firms with heavy insider selling and hard-to-predict earnings. The above results hold regardless of whether a brokerage firm has investment banking business or not. These results are consistent with the hypothesis that analysts use biased earnings forecasts to curry favor with firm management in order to obtain better access to management's private information. Copyright University of Chicago on behalf of the Institute of Professional Accounting, 2006.

This study examines recent regulatory and practitioner concerns that managers provide more (less) information to analysts with more (less) favorable stock recommendations. We examine the relative forecast accuracy of analysts before and after a recommendation issuance under the assumption that increases (decreases) in management-provided information will increase (decrease) analysts' relative forecast accuracy. We find that analysts issuing more favorable recommendations experience a greater increase in their relative forecast accuracy compared with analysts with less favorable recommendations. Additional tests on the change in frequency with which analysts issue forecasts independent of or in conjunction with other analysts after their recommendation change yield corroborating results. In addition, we find that the greater increase in relative accuracy for analysts with more favorable recommendations exists prior to the passage of Regulation FD but not after. The combined results are consistent with analysts receiving relatively more management-provided information following the issuance of more favorable recommendations. Copyright University of Chicago on behalf of the Institute of Professional Accounting, 2006.

ABSTRACT We examine how outsiders rationally interpret a reported loss on derivatives when the application of mark-to-market accounting to cash flow hedges creates a mixed attribute problem. We find that because of the mixed attribute problem, the information content of mark-to-market accounting is related to the information content of historical cost accounting in a very specific way. This relationship allows us to identify the circumstances under which mark-to-market accounting facilitates and when it detracts from the objective of providing an early warning of potential financial distress. We show that the reporting of an impending derivative loss by a distressed firm can actually lead outsiders to infer that the firm is in a better financial position than what they would have inferred under the silence associated with historical cost accounting. Without the mixed attribute problem, mark-to-market accounting would always yield more accurate assessments of the firm's financial position. Copyright University of Chicago on behalf of the Institute of Professional Accounting, 2007.

ABSTRACT  We examine how accounting transparency and investor base jointly affect financial analysts' expectations of mispricing (i.e., expectations of stock price deviations from fundamental value). Within a range of transparency, these two factors interactively amplify analysts' expectations of mispricing-analysts expect a larger positive deviation when a firm's disclosures "more" transparently reveal income-increasing earnings management and the firm's most important investors are described as transient institutional investors with a shorter-term horizon (low concentration in holdings, high portfolio turnover, and frequent momentum trading) rather than dedicated institutional investors with a longer-term horizon (high concentration in holdings, low portfolio turnover, and little momentum trading). Results are consistent with analysts anticipating that transient institutional investors are more likely than dedicated institutional investors to adjust their trading strategies for near-term factors affecting stock mispricings. Our theory and findings extend the accounting disclosure literature by identifying a boundary condition to the common supposition that disclosure transparency necessarily mitigates expected mispricing, and by providing evidence that analysts' pricing judgments are influenced by their "anticipation" of different investors' reactions to firm disclosures. Copyright (c), University of Chicago on behalf of the Accounting Research Center, 2010.

ABSTRACT This paper examines interpretation of accounting standards that provide implementation guidance via affirmative or counter examples. Based on prior psychology research, we predict that practitioners engage in "example-based reasoning" such that they are more likely to conclude that their case qualifies for the same treatment as the example. We test our predictions in two experiments in which participants judge the appropriateness of income-statement recognition. Experiment 1 uses Masters of Business Administration (MBA) students and varies example type (affirmative, counter) and case (revenue recognition, expense recognition) in a 2 × 2 design. Experiment 1 supports our predictions. Experiment 2 uses more experienced practitioners, and varies example type (affirmative, counter, both) in a 1 × 3 design. Experiment 2 supports the use of example-based reasoning, and indicates that practitioners in the "both" condition respond as if they had only received an affirmative example. These results have implications for understanding how guidance that accompanies accounting standards can result in aggressive or conservative application of standards. Copyright University of Chicago on behalf of the Institute of Professional Accounting, 2007.

ABSTRACT In this paper we examine the effect of managerial ownership on financial reporting conservatism. Separation of ownership and control gives rise to agency problems between managers and shareholders. Financial reporting conservatism is one potential mechanism to address these agency problems. We hypothesize that, as managerial ownership declines, the severity of agency problem increases, increasing the demand for conservatism. Consistent with our hypothesis, we find that conservatism as measured by the asymmetric timeliness of earnings declines with managerial ownership. The negative association between managerial ownership and asymmetric timeliness of earnings is robust to various controls, in particular, for the investment opportunity set. We thus provide evidence of a demand for conservatism from the firm's shareholders. Copyright University of Chicago on behalf of the Institute of Professional Accounting, 2008.

This paper investigates the press's role as a monitor or "watchdog" for accounting fraud. I find that the press fulfills this role by rebroadcasting information from other information intermediaries (analysts, auditors, and lawsuits) and by undertaking original investigation and analysis. Articles based on original analysis provide new information to the markets while those that rebroadcast allegations from other intermediaries do not. Consistent with a dual role for the press, I find that business-oriented press is more likely to undertake original analysis while nonbusiness periodicals focus primarily on rebroadcasting. I also investigate the determinates of press coverage, finding systematic biases in the types of firms and frauds for which articles are published. In general, the press covers firms and frauds that will be of interest to a broad set of readers and situations that are lower cost to identify and investigate. Copyright University of Chicago on behalf of the Institute of Professional Accounting, 2006.

Whatever the adjustments that the regulators adopt to take account of the unintended consequences, there are lingering suspicions that the conduct of firms—especially financial firms such as banks and insurance companies—will be changed irretrievably with the widespread adoption of marking to market. The greater immediacy of fair values for capital and profitability may become a source of procyclicality, in which the cycles of boom and bust are amplified. In buoyant economic conditions perceived credit risk might decline, leading to a rise in the fair value of banks' assets, which would in turn boost bank capital and encourage an increase in lending, so strengthening the economic upswing. These same effects would go into reverse with a vengeance in downturns. As the economy declines, perceived credit risk increases, leading to a fall in the marked to market value of banks' assets, which would in turn erode banks' capital. This will result in a credit crunch that will reinforce the downturns. A recent position paper from the European Central Bank (ECB [2004]) conducts simulation exercises on EU banks' assets and capital that suggest strong potential for amplification of the credit cycle. The effects of fair value accounting could, therefore, have far-reaching consequences for the overall stability of the economy.