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Full-Text Articles in Accounting

Customer's Short Positions And Supplier's Investment Decisions, Xia Chen, Guojin Gong, Shuqing Luo Jul 2015

Customer's Short Positions And Supplier's Investment Decisions, Xia Chen, Guojin Gong, Shuqing Luo

Research Collection School Of Accountancy

Short interest contains valuable information about a firm’s business fundamentals. We investigate whether such information affects business partners’ real investment decisions in the supply-chain setting. We predict and find that a supplier’s future investments (including inventory, R&D, and tangible asset investments) decrease with its customer’s current short interest. This negative relation is stronger when the supplier faces greater difficulty in assessing its customer’s business fundamentals and when short interest is more likely to indicate longlasting deterioration in the customer’s fundamentals. Additional analysis does not support the alternative explanation that the supplier adjusts investments in response to unfavorable information obtained via …


Does Increased Board Independence Reduce Earnings Management? Evidence From Recent Regulatory Reforms, Qiang Cheng, Xia Chen, Xin Wang Jun 2015

Does Increased Board Independence Reduce Earnings Management? Evidence From Recent Regulatory Reforms, Qiang Cheng, Xia Chen, Xin Wang

Research Collection School Of Accountancy

In this paper, we examine whether recent regulatory reforms requiring majority board independence are effective in reducing earnings management. Firms that did not have a majority of independent directors prior to the reforms (referred to as non-compliance firms) are required to increase their board independence. We find that overall, compared to the other firms, noncompliance firms do not experience a significant decrease in the extent of earnings management from prior to the reforms to afterwards. However, we find that non-compliance firms with low information acquisition cost experience a significant reduction in earnings management compared with the other firms. The results …


Does Increased Board Independence Reduce Earnings Management? Evidence From The Recent Regulatory Reform, Xia Chen, Qiang Cheng, Xin Wang Jun 2015

Does Increased Board Independence Reduce Earnings Management? Evidence From The Recent Regulatory Reform, Xia Chen, Qiang Cheng, Xin Wang

Research Collection School Of Accountancy

We examine whether recent regulatory reforms requiring majority board independence reduce the extent of earnings management. Firms that did not have a majority of independent directors before the reforms (referred to as noncompliant firms) are required to increase their board independence. We find that, while noncompliant firms on average do not experience a significant decrease in earnings management after the reforms compared to other firms, noncompliant firms with low information acquisition cost experience a significant reduction in earnings management. The results are similar when we examine audit committee independence and when we use alternative proxies for information acquisition cost and …


What Happens When A Stock Is Added To The Nasdaq-100 Index? What Doesn’T Happen?, Susana Yu, Gwendolyn Webb, Kishore Tandon May 2015

What Happens When A Stock Is Added To The Nasdaq-100 Index? What Doesn’T Happen?, Susana Yu, Gwendolyn Webb, Kishore Tandon

Department of Accounting and Finance Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

Purpose – Prior research on additions to the S&P 500 and the smaller MidCap 400 and SmallCap 600 indexes reach different conclusions regarding the key variables that explain the cross-section of announcement period abnormal returns. Most notable in this regard is that liquidity measures, long thought to be of importance, do not appear to explain abnormal returns of the S&P 500 when other factors are controlled for. By contrast, they do appear to matter for additions to the smaller stock indexes. To explore this difference, the purpose of this paper is to analyze the abnormal returns upon announcement that a …


An Investigation Of Credit Borrower Concentration, Heng Yue, Pingui Rao, Jigao Zhu May 2015

An Investigation Of Credit Borrower Concentration, Heng Yue, Pingui Rao, Jigao Zhu

Research Collection School Of Accountancy

Credit borrower concentration arises when a bank or financial institution lends a large amount of its funds to a few large borrowers. We find that borrower concentration is positively related to non-performing loans and negatively related to financial performance. We also find that the voting power of bank’s controlling shareholder is positively related to the borrower concentration. The evidence is consistent with the view that controlling shareholders divert resources away from banks by extending a high volume of loans to a few related parties, which leads to high borrower concentration. Further evidence indicates that some seemingly unrelated large borrowers, as …


Corporate Tax Aggressiveness And Managerial Rent Extraction: Evidence From Insider Trading, Sung Gon Chung, Beng Wee Goh, Kiat Bee Jimmy Lee, Terry J. Shevlin May 2015

Corporate Tax Aggressiveness And Managerial Rent Extraction: Evidence From Insider Trading, Sung Gon Chung, Beng Wee Goh, Kiat Bee Jimmy Lee, Terry J. Shevlin

Research Collection School Of Accountancy

Recent studies argue that aggressive forms of tax avoidance can be used to facilitate managerial rent extraction from shareholders (e.g., Desai 2004; Desai and Dharmapala 2006; Desai et al. 2007). Despite this agency view of tax avoidance receiving increasing attention in the literature, there is limited empirical evidence that managers actually extract rents generated from tax avoidance activities. In this paper, we examine the association between corporate tax aggressiveness and managerial rent extraction in the form of insider trading profitability. We document that, on average, insider purchase profitability, but not sale profitability, is significantly higher in more tax aggressive firms. …


Audit Committees And Financial Reporting Quality In Singapore, Kwong Sin Leong, Jiwei Wang, Themin Suwardy, Yuanto Kusnadi Apr 2015

Audit Committees And Financial Reporting Quality In Singapore, Kwong Sin Leong, Jiwei Wang, Themin Suwardy, Yuanto Kusnadi

Research Collection School Of Accountancy

No abstract provided.


Internal Control And Operational Efficiency, Qiang Cheng, Beng Wee Goh, Jae Bum Kim Apr 2015

Internal Control And Operational Efficiency, Qiang Cheng, Beng Wee Goh, Jae Bum Kim

Research Collection School Of Accountancy

In this study, we examine whether and how internal control over financial reporting affects firm operational efficiency. We find that operational efficiency, derived from the frontier analysis, is significantly lower among firms with material weaknesses in internal control relative to firms without such weaknesses. We document some evidence suggesting that effective internal control leads to greater operational efficiency through reducing the likelihood of misappropriation of corporate resources and through enhancing the quality of internal reports for decision making. We also document that smaller firms benefit more from having effective internal control in terms of operational efficiency. In addition, we find …


Executive Compensation And Regulation Imposed Governance: Evidence From The California Non-Profit Integrity Act (2004), Sandip Dhole, Saleha B. Khumawala, Sagarika Mishra, Tharindra Ranasinghe Mar 2015

Executive Compensation And Regulation Imposed Governance: Evidence From The California Non-Profit Integrity Act (2004), Sandip Dhole, Saleha B. Khumawala, Sagarika Mishra, Tharindra Ranasinghe

Research Collection School Of Accountancy

This study examines the impact of the California Nonprofit Integrity Act of 2004 on CEO compensation costs in affected organizations. Contrary to the stated objective of the Act that executive compensation is “just and reasonable,” we find that CEO compensation costs for affected nonprofits during the post-regulation periods have increased by about 6.3 percent when compared with a control group of comparable unaffected nonprofits. In addition, the relative increase in CEO compensation appears to come from nonprofits that have experienced greater regulatory cost increases. We do not find evidence that the Act resulted in a change in CEO pay performance …


Splitting Specified Foreign Sourced Income Between Tax Exempt And Taxable Portions: An Optimal Solution (Part 3 Of 3), Teng Aun Khoo, Clement Kai Guan Tan Mar 2015

Splitting Specified Foreign Sourced Income Between Tax Exempt And Taxable Portions: An Optimal Solution (Part 3 Of 3), Teng Aun Khoo, Clement Kai Guan Tan

Research Collection School Of Accountancy

No abstract provided.


Isca Pre-Budget Survey Findings 2015: Insights From The Accounting And Business Community, Clarence Goh Feb 2015

Isca Pre-Budget Survey Findings 2015: Insights From The Accounting And Business Community, Clarence Goh

Research Collection School Of Accountancy

Recent forecasts by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) estimate that the global economy will grow by 3.8% in 2015. While this represents an improvement from the 3.3% growth forecasted for 2014, growth in 2015 is expected to be hampered by persistent weakness in the Eurozone and slowdowns in major emerging markets.


Lost Opportunities: The Underuse Of Tax Whistleblowers, Sarah J. Webber, Karie Davis-Nozemack Jan 2015

Lost Opportunities: The Underuse Of Tax Whistleblowers, Sarah J. Webber, Karie Davis-Nozemack

Accounting Faculty Publications

Legal literature on whistleblower programs often assumes an agency’s ability to effectively use a whistleblower tip. This article challenges that assumption in the context of tax enforcement by exposing the Internal Revenue Service’s dismal performance. The article uses Fourth Amendment jurisprudence, taxpayer privacy law, as well as whistleblower and tax enforcement literature to propose a new approach to using information from tax whistleblowers.


What Do Institutional Investors Know And Act On Before Almost Everyone Else: Evidence From Corporate Bankruptcies, Elena Precourt, Henry Oppenheimer Jan 2015

What Do Institutional Investors Know And Act On Before Almost Everyone Else: Evidence From Corporate Bankruptcies, Elena Precourt, Henry Oppenheimer

Accounting Department Faculty Journal Articles

We analyze investment behavior of institutional managers who hold and trade shares of firms that file for bankruptcy. We find that during the five-year period preceding a bankruptcy filing, institutional investors (except those managing investment companies) are net buyers with a positive abnormal net number of shares traded during the period. Institutional managers start to sell shares of bankrupt firms sooner in some firms than in others; these earlier sales are of smaller firms with weaker operating performance, and lower equity risk. We do not find evidence that institutional stockholders trade strategically and avoid material price declines before they occur.


Active Cds Trading And Managers’ Voluntary Disclosure, Jae Bum Kim, Pervin K. Shroff, Dushyantk Umar Vyas, Regina Wittenberg Moerman Jan 2015

Active Cds Trading And Managers’ Voluntary Disclosure, Jae Bum Kim, Pervin K. Shroff, Dushyantk Umar Vyas, Regina Wittenberg Moerman

Research Collection School Of Accountancy

No abstract provided.


Short Selling Pressure, Stock Price Behavior, And Management Forecast Precision: Evidence From A Natural Experiment, Yinghua Li, Liandong Zhang Jan 2015

Short Selling Pressure, Stock Price Behavior, And Management Forecast Precision: Evidence From A Natural Experiment, Yinghua Li, Liandong Zhang

Research Collection School Of Accountancy

Using a natural experiment (Regulation SHO), we show that short selling pressure and consequent stock price behavior have a causal effect on managers' voluntary disclosure choices. Specifically, we find that managers respond to a positive exogenous shock to short selling pressure and price sensitivity to bad news by reducing the precision of bad news forecasts. This finding on management forecasts appears to be generalizable to other corporate disclosures. In particular, we find that, in response to increased short selling pressure, managers also reduce the readability (or increase the fuzziness) of bad news annual reports. Overall, our results suggest that maintaining …


The Inclusion Of General Counsel In Top Management And Tax Avoidance, Beng Wee Goh, Jimmy Lee, Jeffrey Ng Dec 2014

The Inclusion Of General Counsel In Top Management And Tax Avoidance, Beng Wee Goh, Jimmy Lee, Jeffrey Ng

Research Collection School Of Accountancy

We examine whether the inclusion of general counsel in top management is associated with a firm’s tax avoidance. We find that firms with general counsel as part of the top management team have lower GAAP effective tax rate, more uncertain tax positions, a higher likelihood of engaging in tax shelter activities, and more tax haven countries in which the firm reports a significant subsidiary, relative to firms without a general counsel in top management. In addition, we find that among firms with general counsel in top management, tax avoidance is greater when (1) the general counsel has tax-related expertise, (2) …


Cfo Alert: Do You Know What Your Board Audit Committee Is Up To?, Clarence Goh Dec 2014

Cfo Alert: Do You Know What Your Board Audit Committee Is Up To?, Clarence Goh

Research Collection School Of Accountancy

In October 2014, American Realty Capital Properties – one of the largest real estate investment trusts in the US – stunned the market. Its CEO, David Kay, disclosed that the company had overstated its income in the first quarter of the year – and that executives chose not to correct the error in the second quarter “in order to conceal the error.”


Cross-Listings And Corporate Cash Savings: International Evidence, Yuanto Kusnadi Dec 2014

Cross-Listings And Corporate Cash Savings: International Evidence, Yuanto Kusnadi

Research Collection School Of Accountancy

This paper examines foreign firms that are cross-listed on the U.S. stock exchanges and finds that they exhibit higher cash savings sensitivity to stock price than their non-cross-listed counterparts. This finding is robust even after controlling for alternative regression specifications and samples, country-level institutional infrastructures, different listing types, and the endogeneity of the cross-listing decision. Further cross-sectional tests reveal that the increase in cash savings sensitivity to stock price is more pronounced for cross-listed firms with stock prices that are more informative, which is consistent with the influence of the managerial learning channel. The empirical evidence sheds more light on …


Auditor Switching For Opinion Shopping, And Subsequnt Audit Quality And Audit Fee: Evidence From Post-Sox Period, Jong-Hag Choi, Heesun Chung, Catherine Heyjung Sonu, Yoonseok Zang Nov 2014

Auditor Switching For Opinion Shopping, And Subsequnt Audit Quality And Audit Fee: Evidence From Post-Sox Period, Jong-Hag Choi, Heesun Chung, Catherine Heyjung Sonu, Yoonseok Zang

Research Collection School Of Accountancy

Theory suggests that firms engage in opinion shopping to obtain better audit opinions. However, there is scarce evidence on the economic consequences of the opinion shopping behaviors. In this paper, we examine the effect of auditor switches for opinion shopping on audit quality and audit fees. Using 30,333 firm-year observations over the 2004-2012 period in the U.S., we first document evidence that firms switch their auditors in search for better audit opinions. Next, we find that the audit quality of clients that switch auditors for opinion shopping is significantly lower than that of clients that did not switch auditors or …


The Impact Of Mergers And Acquisition Premiums On Financial Performance, Barbara M. Tarasovich Oct 2014

The Impact Of Mergers And Acquisition Premiums On Financial Performance, Barbara M. Tarasovich

WCBT Faculty Publications

The purpose of this paper was to examine why so many M&A (Mergers and Acquisitions) continue to take place at steep premiums in spite of lower returns to shareholders. The pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries present a unique opportunity to investigate the financial impact on acquiring companies and of acquisition premiums. This paper empirically examines if post-merger financial performance is correlated to acquisition premiums. The paper analyzes M&A in the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries with effective dates between January 1, 1998, and December 31, 2005 The analysis showed that acquisition premiums are positively related to long term under performance of the …


Internal Control And Operational Efficiency, Qiang Cheng, Beng Wee Goh, Jae Bum Kim Oct 2014

Internal Control And Operational Efficiency, Qiang Cheng, Beng Wee Goh, Jae Bum Kim

Research Collection School Of Accountancy

In this study, we examine whether and how internal control over financial reporting affects firmoperational efficiency. We find that operational efficiency, derived from the frontier analysis, issignificantly lower among firms with material weaknesses in internal control relative to firmswithout such weaknesses. We document some evidence suggesting that effective internal controlleads to greater operational efficiency through reducing the likelihood of misappropriation ofcorporate resources and through enhancing the quality of internal reports for decision making.We also document that smaller firms benefit more from having effective internal control in termsof operational efficiency. In addition, we find that the market appears to understand the …


Board Interlocks And The Diffusion Of Disclosure Policy, Ye Cai, Dan S. Dhaliwal, Yongtae Kim, Carrie Pan Sep 2014

Board Interlocks And The Diffusion Of Disclosure Policy, Ye Cai, Dan S. Dhaliwal, Yongtae Kim, Carrie Pan

Accounting

We examine whether board connections through shared directors influence firm disclosure policies. To overcome endogeneity challenges, we focus on an event that represents a significant change in firm disclosure policy: the cessation of quarterly earnings guidance. Our research design allows us to exploit the timing of director interlocks and therefore differentiate the director interlock effect on disclosure policy contagion from alternative explanations, such as endogenous director-firm matching or strategic board stacking. We find that firms are more likely to stop providing quarterly earnings guidance if they share directors with previous guidance stoppers. We also find that director-specific experience from prior …


Family Firm Research: A Review, Qiang Cheng Sep 2014

Family Firm Research: A Review, Qiang Cheng

Research Collection School Of Accountancy

This article reviews family firm studies in the finance and accounting literature, primarily those conducted using data from the United States and China. Family owners have unique features such as concentrated ownership, long investment horizon, and reputation concerns. Given the distinguishing features of family ownership and control, family firms face unique agency conflicts. We discuss the agency problems in family firms and review the findings of recent family firm studies. We call for more research to understand the unique family effects and encourage more research on Chinese family firms. Part I of the article discusses the fundaments of family firms: …


Conservatism And Equity Ownership Of The Founding Family, Shuping Chen, Xia Chen, Qiang Cheng Jul 2014

Conservatism And Equity Ownership Of The Founding Family, Shuping Chen, Xia Chen, Qiang Cheng

Research Collection School Of Accountancy

We investigate the impact of founding family ownership on accounting conservatism. Family ownership is characterised by large, under-diversified equity stake and long investment horizon. These features give family owners both the incentives and the ability to implement conservative financial reporting to reduce legal liability and mitigate agency conflicts with other stakeholders. Since CEOs can have different incentives towards conservatism, we focus on ownership of non-CEO founding family members in our investigation. We find that conservatism increases with non-CEO family ownership, supporting our prediction. This relationship becomes insignificant in family firms with founders serving as CEOs, either due to founder CEOs' …


Corporate Governance And Cash Holdings In Listed Non-Financial Firms In Pakistan, Alina Masood, Attaullah Shah Jul 2014

Corporate Governance And Cash Holdings In Listed Non-Financial Firms In Pakistan, Alina Masood, Attaullah Shah

Business Review

In this study, the relationship between corporate cash holdings and corporate governance variables is tested in Pakistan. The sample consists of 309 non-financial firms listed on the Karachi Stock Exchange (KSE) over the time span of 2002 to 2010. The study uses several proxies for corporate governance mechanisms such as percentage ownership held by directors, institutional investors, and five largest shareholders, the existence of audit committees and a measure of concentration of ownership. To avoid omitted variable bias, the study also controls for all well-known determinants of corporate cash holdings (market to-book ratio, growth, size, leverage, R&D investments, cash flow …


Should Singapore Adopt 'Say On Pay'?, Clarence Goh Jul 2014

Should Singapore Adopt 'Say On Pay'?, Clarence Goh

Research Collection School Of Accountancy

SoP may require disclosures that could harm a firm's competitive interests.


Should Singapore Adopt 'Say On Pay'?, Clarence Goh Jul 2014

Should Singapore Adopt 'Say On Pay'?, Clarence Goh

Research Collection School Of Accountancy

SoP may require disclosures that could harm a firm's competitive interests.


Societal Trust And Corporate Tax Avoidance, Kiridaran Kanagaretnam, Jimmy Lee, Chee Yeow Lim, Gerald J. Lobo Jun 2014

Societal Trust And Corporate Tax Avoidance, Kiridaran Kanagaretnam, Jimmy Lee, Chee Yeow Lim, Gerald J. Lobo

Research Collection School Of Accountancy

Using an international sample of firms and a country-level index for societal trust, we study how differences in trust across countries relate to corporate tax avoidance. Consistent with our prediction, we find strong evidence that societal trust is negatively associated with corporate tax avoidance by firms, even after controlling for other determinants such as home country tax system characteristics. We also explore the effects of three country-level institutional characteristics – level of investor protection, disclosure requirement, and tax enforcement – on the relation between societal trust and tax avoidance. We predict and find that the effects of trust on tax …


Managers' Pay Duration And Voluntary Disclosures, Qiang Cheng, Young Jun Cho, Jae Bum Kim Jun 2014

Managers' Pay Duration And Voluntary Disclosures, Qiang Cheng, Young Jun Cho, Jae Bum Kim

Research Collection School Of Accountancy

In this paper, we examine the effect of managers’ pay duration on firms’ voluntary disclosures. Pay duration refers to the average period that it takes for managers’ annual compensation to vest. We hypothesize and find that pay duration can incentivize managers to provide more bad news earnings forecasts. This result holds after controlling for the level of stock-based compensation and the endogeneity of pay duration. In addition, we find that the effect of pay duration is more pronounced for firms with weaker governance and for firms with a more opaque information environment, where the marginal benefits of additional disclosures are …


The Triangular Relationship Between Audit Committee Characteristics, Audit Inputs, And Financial Reporting Quality, Jae Bum Kim, Benjamin Segal, Dan Segal, Yoonseok Zang Jun 2014

The Triangular Relationship Between Audit Committee Characteristics, Audit Inputs, And Financial Reporting Quality, Jae Bum Kim, Benjamin Segal, Dan Segal, Yoonseok Zang

Research Collection School Of Accountancy

Using the exogenous reforms to audit committees mandated by the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 and a difference-in-difference approach, we examine the impact of changes in audit committee attributes (financial expertise, size, and independence) on firms’ audit inputs and financial reporting quality. Firms directly affected by the reforms experienced a larger improvement in audit inputs (measured by audit fees and the appointment of an industry specialist auditor) and a larger increase in financial reporting quality (measured by restatements of financial reports) relative to firms that were already compliant. Importantly, we find that the decline in restatements is not related to the …