We examine broad effects of MiFID II, which mandated unbundled pricing of analyst research in the European Union beginning in 2018. We find significant reductions in sell-side analyst following, particularly for firms for which the marginal analyst was less important (larger, older, less volatile firms with greater coverage and more accurate forecasts). High quality analysts (more accurate, experienced, and in positions of seniority) were more likely to leave the sell-side and move to the buy-side, while remaining sell-side analysts increased efforts to make their forecasts more informative (more accurate, more detailed, and more likely to include informative recommendations resulting in larger stock price responses). Firms responded to a loss of sell-side coverage with more frequent, forward-looking, and informative investor relations events, especially for firms that lost the most coverage. Our results support recent theoretical analysis predicting that unbundling had significant implications for sell-side research, buy-side research, and firm responses.

We examine the effect of news media consolidation on local business coverage and its consequences for firms, investors, and capital markets. Using television transcripts, we find a substantial drop in coverage of local firms following the consolidation of local television stations associated with Sinclair acquisitions. Local information search, institutional portfolio local bias, and overall retail trading decrease for firms in treated geographic areas. Results are most pronounced for small firms, for stations with higher ex ante viewership, and for stations with greater reductions in local coverage. Our results provide insight into the consequences of media consolidation for local business coverage, firms, investors, and capital markets.

We review the accounting literature on innovation, focusing on the economic attributes of innovation that collectively differentiate innovation from other assets: novelty, nonrivalry, and partial excludability. These attributes help innovation drive economic growth but create unique information-based challenges that accounting information and researchers are well suited to address. We discuss the definition and measurement of innovation and highlight common mistakes researchers make when measuring innovation and when using sources of plausibly exogenous variation. We then review the accounting literatures on the disclosure, management, financial reporting, taxation, and contracting and financing of innovation. For each of these literatures we identify challenges and opportunities for future research.

We examine the relation between plant-level predictive analytics use and centralization of authority for more than 25,000 manufacturing plants using proprietary US Census data. We focus on headquarters' authority over plants through delegation of decision-making and design of performance-based incentives. We find that increased predictive analytics use is associated with reduced delegation of decision-rights to local managers, increased centralization of control over data gathering and reduced plant managerial payrolls. In terms of incentives, predictive analytics use is associated with more accurate targets and tighter linkages between rewards to workers (performance-based bonuses, promotions and firings) and measured performance. Overall, our findings suggest that predictive analytics use is associated with increased centralization of authority in headquarters.

We review the accounting literature on innovation, focusing on the attributes of innovation that collectively make it unique from other resources: novelty, nonrivalry, and partial excludability. These unique attributes help innovation drive economic growth but create information-based challenges that accounting researchers are well-suited to address. We discuss the definition and measurement of innovation, then review the accounting literatures on the disclosure, management, financial reporting, taxation, and contracting and financing of innovation. For each of these literatures we identify challenges and opportunities for future research.

The patent system grants inventors temporary monopoly rights in exchange for a public disclosure detailing their innovation. These disclosures are meant to allow others to recreate and build on the patented innovation. We examine how the quality of these disclosures affects follow-on innovation. We use the plausibly exogenous assignment to patent applications of examiners who differ in their enforcement of disclosure requirements as a source of variation in disclosure quality. We find that some examiners are significantly more lenient with respect to patent disclosure quality requirements, and that patents granted by these examiners include significantly lower-quality disclosures and generate significantly less follow-on innovation. Overall, our evidence suggests that high-quality patent disclosures create knowledge spillovers that spur follow-on innovation.

ABSTRACTWe investigate Chinese firms' use of variable interest entities (VIEs) to list in the U.S. Since VIEs are explicitly designed to circumvent Chinese restrictions on foreign investments, they potentially increase the risk of government intervention and agency conflicts within the firm. The use of VIEs among Chinese firms listed in the U.S. is widespread, growing, and associated with valuation discounts of approximately 25 percent relative to Chinese non-VIE firms listed in the U.S. The discount varies predictably with events that change VIE risks and is tempered by better oversight (large auditor and institutional investment) and factors that lower regulatory risk (political connection and high media visibility). To remediate investor concerns, VIE firms are more likely to have these characteristics. Finally, we find that the risk of intervention disciplines VIE managers who curry government favor by contributing to disaster relief and hiring excess employees.Data Availability: Data are available from public sources cited in the text.JEL Classifications: G30; G34; M41; K22.

We examine whether textual attributes of founder-led firms' regulatory filings reflect founder-CEO characteristics and whether investors consider this relation when assessing firm value. We build on prior research that shows founders have unique personality attributes, particularly overoptimism. Our results suggest that 10-K text for founder-led firms is characterized by "excess" optimism relative to current and future realized earnings and relative to non-founder-led firms. The effect is mitigated for firms with large auditors, high litigation risk and high analyst following. Based on the stock price at the 10-K release, investors do not appear to appropriately discount the tone, resulting in predictable negative returns during the year subsequent to the 10-K release, particularly for the first 2 years after firms go public. Collectively, our findings contribute to the existing literature examining the effects of executives on firm disclosure by providing initial evidence about the conditions under which firms' scripted narrative disclosures reflect CEO characteristics.

We have little knowledge about the prevalence of irreproducibility in the accounting literature. To narrow this gap, we conducted a survey among the participants of the 2019 JAR Conference on their perceptions of the frequency, causes, and consequences of irreproducible research published in accounting journals. A majority of respondents believe that irreproducibility is common in the literature, constitutes a major problem, and receives too little attention. Most have encountered irreproducibility in the work of others (although not in their own work) but chose not to pursue their failed reproduction attempts to publication. Respondents believe irreproducibility results chiefly from career or publication incentives as well as from selective reporting of results. They also believe that practices like sharing code and data combined with stronger incentives to replicate the work of others would enhance reproducibility. The views of accounting researchers are remarkably similar to those expressed in a survey by the scientific journal Nature. We conclude by discussing the implications of our findings and provide several potential paths forward for the accounting research community.

We investigate the effect of cross-border regulatory cooperation in the enforcement of securities laws on global-mutual-fund portfolio allocations. Our research design exploits a shock to the Securities and Exchange Commission's oversight of foreign firms cross-listed on a US stock exchange around the signing of the Multilateral Memorandum of Understanding (MMoU), a non-binding, information-sharing arrangement between global securities regulators. In signatory countries, foreign investment in US-cross-listed firms increases by $110 billion relative to non-cross-listed firms. The strongest effects are for investors facing greater information asymmetries, those from countries closely linked to the US, and non-US foreign investors, suggesting significant spillover effects from international regulatory cooperation.

We examine the relation between plant-level predictive analytics use and centralization of authority for more than 25,000 manufacturing plants using proprietary US Census data. We focus on headquarters authority over plants through delegation of decision-making and design of performance-based incentives. We find that increased predictive analytics use is associated with reduced delegation of decision-rights to local managers, increased centralization of control over data gathering and reduced plant managerial payrolls. In terms of incentives, predictive analytics use is associated with more accurate targets and tighter linkages between rewards to workers (performance-based bonuses, promotions and firings) and measured performance. Overall, our findings suggest that predictive analytics use is associated with increased centralization of authority in headquarters.

ABSTRACT This study addresses whether voluntary IFRS adoption is associated with increased comparability of accounting amounts and capital market benefits. We find that after firms voluntarily adopt IFRS (“adopting” firms), their accounting amounts are more comparable to those of firms that previously adopted IFRS (“adopted” firms) and less comparable to those of firms that apply domestic standards (“non-adopting” firms). Adopting firms exhibit increased liquidity, share turnover, and firm-specific information relative to adopted and non-adopting firms. Neither adopted nor non-adopting firms suffer capital market consequences. Adopting firms with higher comparability with adopted firms have greater capital market benefits after adopting IFRS than adopting firms with lower comparability, and capital market benefits for adopting firms in countries with a relatively high percentage of firms that apply IFRS enjoy greater capital market benefits.

We investigate Chinese firms’ use of variable interest entities (VIEs) to evade Chinese regulation on foreign ownership and list in the US. VIEs are explicitly designed to circumvent the intent of Chinese law on foreign control, and potentially exacerbate agency conflicts within the firm. We find that the use of VIEs is widespread and growing, and estimate that it is associated with valuation discounts of as much as 30% relative to Chinese non-VIE firms listed in the US. The discount varies predictably with events that change the risk of government intervention and managerial malfeasance, and is tempered by better oversight (large auditor and institutional investment) and lower regulatory risk (politically connected directors and high media visibility). To protect shareholders, VIE firms are more likely to have these characteristics as well as to curry government favor by contributing to disaster relief and hiring excess employees.

ABSTRACTWe discuss the evolution of research on textual attributes in accounting and suggest potential directions for future research using Cazier and Pfeiffer (2017) to illustrate the challenges and opportunities in the literature. We categorize the literature based on whether a given textual attribute is assumed to be “discretionary” versus “nondiscretionary” and whether it is assumed to be “helpful” versus “harmful.” The literature to date has been largely descriptive, with limited focus on causality, and we argue that there are substantial opportunities for research that better isolate the discretionary components of textual disclosure, as well as identifying specific contexts in which a given attribute is more likely to be helpful than harmful.JEL Classifications: D8; M4.

We investigate the effect of CFO narcissism, as measured by signature size, on financial reporting quality. Experimentally, we validate that narcissism predicts misreporting behavior, and that signature size predicts misreporting through its association with narcissism. Empirically, we examine notarized CFO signatures and find CFO narcissism is associated with more earnings management, less timely loss recognition, weaker internal control quality, and a higher probability of restatements. The results are consistent for within-firm comparisons focusing on CFO changes and are robust to controlling for CFO overconfidence and CEO narcissism. The results highlight the importance of CFO characteristics in the domain of financial reporting decisions.

We discuss the evolution of research on textual attributes in accounting and suggest potential directions for future research using Cazier and Pfeiffer (2017) to illustrate the challenges and opportunities in the literature. We categorize the literature based on whether a given textual attribute is assumed to be "discretionary" versus "nondiscretionary" and whether it is assumed to be "helpful" versus "harmful." The literature to date has been largely descriptive, with limited focus on causality, and we argue that there are substantial opportunities for research that better isolate the discretionary components of textual disclosure, as well as identifying specific contexts in which a given attribute is more likely to be helpful than harmful.