Accounting Commons^™

Digital Transformation's Impact On Innovation In Private Enterprises: Evidence From China, Li Chen, Ruixiang Tu, Boxuan Huang, Haiyan Zhou, Yumei Wu

School of Accountancy Faculty Publications and Presentations

In the digital economy era, the pathways of digital transformation and intelligent development have emerged as crucial avenues for enterprises’ high-quality development. Focusing on listed private enterprises from 2011 to 2020, this study uses text mining to extract keywords related to digital transformation, as disclosed in annual reports. We construct a digital transformation index and empirically examine its impact on enterprise innovation and innovation incentive policies’ synergistic effects. The results demonstrate that digital transformation significantly promotes innovation in private enterprises, with a more pronounced catalytic effect in economically developed regions characterised by higher levels of the digital economy and larger …

Climate Policy Uncertainty And Corporate Tax Avoidance, Md Ruhul Amin, Akinloye Akindayomi, Md Showaib Rahman Sarker, Rafiqul Bhuyan

School of Accountancy Faculty Publications and Presentations

Highlights

• This study investigates the relation between climate policy uncertainty and corporate tax avoidance.

• Firms undertake aggressive tax avoidance strategies during periods of heightened climate policy uncertainty.

• Further analysis indicates that cash savings from lower tax payments are used to pay dividends and not retained for reinvestment.

• Findings are consistent with the precautionary hypothesis that firms become more (i) conservative in their long-term investment strategies and (ii) risk-averse during periods of elevated climate policy uncertainty.

Abstract

This study examines the relation between climate policy uncertainty and corporate tax avoidance. Using a novel measure of climate policy uncertainty (CPU), we document …

Do Community Banks In Fast-Growing Metropolitan Areas Outperform Rural Community Banks?, Nicole A. Morrison

School of Accountancy Faculty Publications and Presentations

Prior research found that community banks in rural areas outperformed community banks in metropolitan areas in terms of pre-tax return on assets and the variables contributing to it. However, a study on community banks by the FDIC in 2020 mentioned that community banks in the fastest growing metropolitan areas from 2010 through 2020 performed better than those in other metropolitan areas without comparing that performance to rural community banks. This study addresses that gap using a 2014 dataset and finds that, on average, community banks in the fastest-growing metropolitan statistical areas do not outperform rural community banks. The summary data …

To Cancel Debt Or Not To Cancel Debt: Evaluation Of Debt Cancellation Or Provide A Tax Credit, Jose Jay Vega, Jan Smolarski, Nikki Shoemaker, Kelly Noe

School of Accountancy Faculty Publications and Presentations

U.S. students are facing unprecedented student loan debt levels, roughly $1.75 trillion. The Biden Administration is proposing a debt relief program that will cancel student loan debt up to $20,000 for Pell Granted individuals. However, the current plan has faced substantial legal challenges and political pressure, and as suggested, it could increase the current inflation crisis. However, the size of the inflation effect is subject to debate. On the lower end, student debt relief may add only about 0.2% points to annual inflation. Proponents have also circulated linking student loan repayment to income levels. We propose an alternative approach to …

Strategic Use Of Volume Of Financial Items In 10-K Reports, C. S. A. Cheng, Jiajia Fu, Wenli Huang, Jiao Jing

School of Accountancy Faculty Publications and Presentations

We investigate whether firms limit the volume of financial items in annual reports (including the financial statements and footnotes) to obfuscate poor future firm performance, and how investors react to this reduced volume. We estimate abnormal volume to capture managers’ discretion over reporting in the 10-K and find that abnormally low volume predicts poor future earnings. This relation is more pronounced in firms where the market has difficulty in detecting managerial intervention in the disclosure process. We also find that abnormally low volume predicts negative future returns, suggesting that managers benefit from disclosing fewer financial items by delaying the incorporation …

The Great Sell-Side Sell-Off: Evidence Of Declining Financial Analyst Coverage, Barry Hettler, Justyna Skomra, Arno Forst

School of Accountancy Faculty Publications and Presentations

Purpose

Motivated by significant global developments affecting the sell-side industry, in particular a shift toward passive investments and growing regulation, this study examines whether financial analyst coverage declined over the past decade and if any loss of analyst coverage is associated with a change in forecast accuracy.

Design/methodology/approach

After investigating, and confirming, a general decline in analyst following, the authors calculate the loss of analyst coverage relative to the firm-specific maximum between 2009 and 2013. In multivariate analyses, the authors then examine whether this loss of coverage differs across geographic region, firm size and capital market development, and whether it …

Ceo Marital Status And Dividend Policy, Md Noman Hossain, Monika K. Rabarison, Brandon Ater, Christian K. Sobngwi

School of Accountancy Faculty Publications and Presentations

We investigate whether and how CEO marital status is related to dividend policy. We find that firms run by single CEOs are less likely to pay dividends. Further analyses reveal that the aforementioned relation is stronger for single CEOs who are more risk-seeking, have compensation packages with lower pay-performance sensitivity, are less conservative, or are less engaged in corporate social responsibility activities. Our results hold in multiple robustness and endogeneity tests, including propensity score matching, difference-in-differences estimation, and an instrumental variable regression. Overall, our findings contribute to the literature highlighting the importance of CEOs' personal attributes for corporate decisions.

Dual-Class Share Structure And Innovation, Lindsay Baran, Arno Forst, M. Tony Via

School of Accountancy Faculty Publications and Presentations

Using a sample of dual-class firms matched with single-class firms possessing similar antitakeover protection, we find a positive association between disproportionate insider control and patent output, quality, creativity, research and development efficiency, and chief executive officer innovative risk taking. We also find, however, that the positive effects of disproportionate control on innovation are concentrated in financially constrained firms and firms in highly competitive industries, and that the positive effects dissipate within 10 years after the initial public offering. Most important, the positive effect of dual-class structures for innovation is conditional on the presence of innovative insiders in the firm. These …

Why Do Employees Commit Fraud? Theory, Measurement, And Validation, Bin Lin, Junqin Huang, Youliang Liao, Shanmin Liu, Haiyan Zhou

School of Accountancy Faculty Publications and Presentations

Previous research on corporate governance has extensively explored the motives of corporate fraud. However, this research has paid little attention to employees, the real executors of fraud, resulting in the psychological and behavioral decision-making process of employees who commit fraud in enterprises becoming a "black box" that has not yet been opened. Based on the theory of planned behavior, our study integrates the existing research findings on driving factors of employee fraud and anti-fraud practical experience, extracts the key factors of employee fraud motive, and develops a multidimensional scale of employee fraud motive. The exploratory factor analysis (EFA) generates three …

Free Cash Flows And Price Momentum, Jiajia Fu, Fangming Xu, Cheng Zeng, Lily Zheng

School of Accountancy Faculty Publications and Presentations

This study investigates the role of free cash flows and (cross-sectional and time-series) price momentum in predicting future stock returns. Past returns and free cash flows each positively predict future stock returns after controlling for the other, suggesting that cash flows and momentum both contain valuable and distinctive information about future stock returns. A strategy of buying past winners with high free cash flows and shorting past losers with low free cash flows significantly outperforms the traditional momentum trading strategy. The enhanced performance is not sensitive to investor sentiment, time variations, or transaction costs. Further analysis shows that the incremental …

Living Up To Your Codes? Corporate Codes Of Ethics And The Cost Of Equity Capital, Hong Kim Duong, Marco Fasan, Giorgio Gotti

School of Accountancy Faculty Publications and Presentations

Purpose

Previous literature provides mixed evidence about the effectiveness of a code of ethics in limiting managerial opportunism. While some studies find that code of ethics is merely window-dressing, others find that they do influence managers' behavior. The present study investigates whether the quality of a code of ethics decreases the cost of equity by limiting managerial opportunism.

Design/methodology/approach

In order to test the hypothesis, the authors perform an empirical analysis on a sample of US companies in the 2004–2012 period. The results are robust to a battery of robustness analyses that the authors performed in order to take care …

Media As Other Information For Fundamental Valuation, Jiajia Fu, Jingran Zhao

School of Accountancy Faculty Publications and Presentations

The media is an important information intermediary. We investigate the informational role of the media by examining whether media content, measured by the sentiment of news articles, contains information about a firm’s fundamental value beyond that conveyed in earnings, book value, and analyst forecasts. We show that incorporating media content into Ohlson’s (1995) residual income model generally improves its ability to predict future residual income, explain current stock prices, and predict future stock prices. Our results are strengthened when media coverage is higher and when media sentiment is more dispersed

Excess Insider Control And Corporate Social Responsibility: Evidence From Dual-Class Firms, Barry Hettler, Arno Forst, James Cordeiro, Stacy Chavez

School of Accountancy Faculty Publications and Presentations

We investigate the corporate social responsibility (CSR) performance of firms with a dual-class share structure. Dual-class firms, which represent a fast-growing segment of the U.S. capital market, violate the "one share, one vote" principle by giving corporate insiders control in excess of their economic interest in the firm. We observe a negative association of excess insider control and firms’ CSR performance, primarily with respect to the community- and employee-related dimensions of CSR. Extended analyses reveal that this negative association is mitigated by high financial resource availability. Consistent with a trade-off between corporate spending on CSR or on benefits for insiders, …

The Contagion Effect Of Compensation Regulation: Evidence From China, Jun Shao, Haiyan Zhou, Na Gong, Junzi Zhang

School of Accountancy Faculty Publications and Presentations

To shed light on whether and how firms changed compensation practices in response to a shift in the environment in which they operated, we examine whether there is contagion effect of executive compensation regulation on state-owned enterprises (SOEs) in the emerging market of China. Specifically, we investigate whether firms not directly affected by the changing regulatory environment nonetheless changed executive compensation in response to the actions of the directly affected firms, which is called contagion effect. We further examine the specific contagion mechanisms and the economic consequences of regulation on compensation. We find that the regulation has a significant effect …

The Power Of Unrequited Love: The Parasocial Relationship, Trust, And Organizational Identification Between Middle-Level Managers And Ceos, Youliang Liao, Bin Lin, Haiyan Zhou, Xi Yang

School of Accountancy Faculty Publications and Presentations

Previous studies have found that CEOs manage their firms through traditional methods such as leadership and management practices. In this study, we investigate how the parasocial relationship (PSR) between middle-level managers and CEOs affects the organizational trust and the organizational identification (OI) of middle managers. We find that the PSR between middle managers and CEOs has a positive effect on the OI of middle managers, which is mediated by the organizational trust of middle managers.

Purpose: Middle managers and CEOs are the key components of a firm and are crucial to firm strategies and control systems. Middle managers play a …

Do The Specific Countries In Which A Multinational Corporation Operates Affect Its Private Loan Contracts?, Brandon Ater, Bowe Hansen

School of Accountancy Faculty Publications and Presentations

Previous research has shown that higher levels of firm globalization lead to a lower cost of private debt. However, this research generally treats globalization as a homogeneous attribute ignoring the specific countries in which a multinational corporation (MNC) operates. Using a sample of U.S. MNCs from 1999 through 2017, we relax this assumption and find that while the results from prior research hold with regards to the level of an MNC’s operations in segments reported at the regional or continent-wide level, the level of an MNC’s operations in countries with low institutional quality is associated with a higher cost of …

Language In Economics And Accounting Research: The Role Of Linguistic History, Giorgio Gotti, Seán G. Roberts, Marco Fasan, Cole B. J. Robertson

School of Accountancy Faculty Publications and Presentations

This paper investigates whether a consideration of linguistic history is important when studying the relationship between economic and linguistic behaviors. Several recent economic studies have suggested that differences between languages can affect the way people think and behave (linguistic relativity or Sapir–Whorf hypothesis). For example, the way a language obliges one to talk about the future might influence intertemporal decisions, such as a company’s earnings management. However, languages have historical relations that lead to shared features—they do not constitute independent observations. This can inflate correlations between variables if not dealt with appropriately (Galton’s problem). We discuss this problem …

How Many Simultaneous Audit Committee Memberships Are Too Many?, Jimmy Carmenate, Cori O. Crews, Vineeta D. Sharma, John R. Sparger

School of Accountancy Faculty Publications and Presentations

Recent research by Sharma, Sharma, Tanyi, and Cheng (2020) provides new insight into directors serving on multiple public company audit committees. Specifically, they investigate how an individual audit committee director serving on multiple audit committees is related to companies’ cost of equity capital. Their evidence suggests that serving on multiple audit committees is viewed positively by investors up to a certain point, but beyond that point investors become concerned. This turning point, on average, is 3.5 audit committees for retired directors and 1.5 audit committees for directors in full-time employment. These results have implications for numerous stakeholders including investors, proxy …

Product Market Competition, Stock Price Informativeness, And Ifrs Adoption: Evidence From Europe, Jing Wang, Wei Li, Arno Forst

School of Accountancy Faculty Publications and Presentations

This study examines whether and how policy changes that aim to improve market efficiency, specifically the mandatory adoption of International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS), influence the relation between product market competition and stock price informativeness. Using a sample of European firms, we find a negative association between product market competition and stock price informativeness as evidenced by larger (smaller) stock price changes surrounding earnings announcements for firms facing more (less) product market competition. These findings are consistent with prior studies examining the U.S. capital market. We further find that IFRS adoption alleviates the negative association. This positive effect is more …

Business Strategy, State-Owned Equity And Cost Stickiness: Evidence From Chinese Firms, Tingyong Zhong, Fangcheng Sun, Haiyan Zhou, Jeoung Yul Lee

School of Accountancy Faculty Publications and Presentations

This paper investigates the relationship between business strategy and cost stickiness under different ownership. Using the data from listed firms in China from 2002 to 2015, we find that first, firms with different strategies exhibit different cost behavior. The cost stickiness of choosing a differentiation strategy is higher than that of choosing a low-cost strategy. Second, management expectations will affect cost stickiness. Optimistic expectations will increase cost stickiness, while pessimistic expectations will reduce cost stickiness. Third, management expectations can adjust the relationship between business strategy and cost stickiness in terms of government-created advantages (GCAs). If management expectations tend to be …

Financial Market Development And Firm Investment In Tax Avoidance: Evidence From Credit Default Swap Market, Hyun A. Hong, Gerald J. Lobo, Ji Woo Ryou

School of Accountancy Faculty Publications and Presentations

Lenders reduce their monitoring efforts after hedging their credit risk exposure through credit default swap (CDS) contracts, which are akin to insurance against borrowers’ adverse credit events. In this study, we examine whether, upon observing the reduced lender monitoring following CDS trading, shareholders demand that borrowing firms invest in more aggressive tax planning strategies, which were previously constrained by risk-averse lenders. Using a difference-in-differences design that exploits the variation in timing of the inception of CDS trading, we document that borrowers exhibit greater tax avoidance after the inception of CDS trading. Consistent with shareholders stepping up their demands post-CDS, we …

Disproportionate Insider Control And Firm Performance, Barry Hettler, Arno Forst

School of Accountancy Faculty Publications and Presentations

The effect of disproportionate insider control on firm performance is ambiguous. Disproportionate control may enhance insiders’ ability to expropriate perquisites; on the other hand, it may provide stability of management and reduce short-term market pressures. Using a hand-collected sample of U.S. dual-class firms, we find that disproportionate control is positively associated with accounting-based performance, but negatively associated with Tobin's Q. These results are consistent with the incentives of entrenched insiders who are interested in profitability but less beholden to capital markets.

Insider Ownership And Financial Analysts’ Information Environment: Evidence From Dual-Class Firms, Arno Forst, Barry Hettler, Ran Ron Barniv

School of Accountancy Faculty Publications and Presentations

We examine the association of insider ownership with financial analysts’ forecast accuracy and dispersion in a sample of U.S. dual-class firms. Insider ownership exerts two effects: a positive incentive effect and a negative entrenchment effect. The lack of significant findings in prior research regarding the association between insider ownership and forecast accuracy may be attributable to the offsetting forces of these two effects. Using a comprehensive hand-collected sample of U.S. firms that maintain more than one class of common stock, we are able to disentangle incentive and entrenchment effects which are confounded in single-class firms. We find that disproportionate insider …

Disproportionate Insider Control And The Demand For Audit Quality, Arno Forst, Barry Hettler

School of Accountancy Faculty Publications and Presentations

We examine the relationship between disproportionate insider control, enabled through dual-class share structures, and the demand for audit quality. Using a comprehensive hand-collected sample of U.S. dual-class firms, we find that, consistent with outside shareholders’ increased demand for external monitoring, as well as self-bonding by entrenched insiders, disproportionate insider control is positively associated with the propensity to hire a Big 4 or industry specialist auditor, auditor independence, and audit fees. Corroborating a self-bonding explanation, additional analyses show that audit quality mitigates the negative association of disproportionate insider control and firm value. In expanded analyses, we also investigate the separate effects …

Heightened Shareholder Interest In Firm Affairs Following The Inception Of Credit Default, Hyun Hong, Ji Woo Ryou, Anup Srivastava

School of Accountancy Faculty Publications and Presentations

The literature shows that a lender becomes reluctant to aid a distressed client after it receives insurance on its outstanding debt via a credit default swap (CDS). The onset of CDS trade thus accelerates client bankruptcy. We predict that the client firm’s shareholders would respond by demanding improved corporate governance and financial reporting quality to protect their interests. We find an increase in independence of the board of directors and a decline in the dual position of chief executive office and board chairman following the onset of CDS trading. We also find higher earnings response coefficient and trading volumes around …

Drug Violence In Mexico And Its Impact On The Fiscal Realities Of Border Cities In Texas: Evidence From Rio Grande Valley Counties, Akinloye Akindayomi, Sergio Garcia

School of Accountancy Faculty Publications and Presentations

This study examines the potential spillover effects of the Mexican drug war and its associated violence on the fiscal realities of the U.S. border counties. Specifically, we study descriptively the data from the Rio Grande Valley (RGV) counties of the state of Texas, placing it within the broader context of all Texas counties, and find initial evidence of possible ‘silver lining’ spilling over from Mexican drug violence to the U.S. border counties’ fiscal positions. Housing activities increase and property tax reliance decreases in RGV counties relative to other Texas counties (both border and non-border). We anticipate that the findings and …

Analysts’ Activities And The Timing Of Returns: Implications For Predicting Returns, Andrew A. Anabila

School of Accountancy Faculty Publications and Presentations

This study examines the influence of analysts on the timing of returns associated with firms’ earnings news, and the implications for returns prediction. This is important for determining the lapse between the time when pieces of earnings news are available, when such news are incorporated in prices, and the implications for a returns trading strategy based on earnings prediction. The results show that depending on the level of analysts’ forecasting activities for a firm, there is a significant variation in the timing of the returns associated with the firm’s total, industry-wide and firm-specific components of earnings news. For firms that …

Students Perceptions Of Cheating In Online Business Courses, Michael P. Watters, Paul J. Robertson, Renae K. Clark

School of Accountancy Faculty Publications and Presentations

Accounting majors enrolled in business courses at two different universities were asked to complete a survey questionnaire pertaining to cheating in online business courses. Specifically, students majoring in Accounting were asked about their awareness online business courses as well as their opinions regarding the credibility of online courses and the effectiveness of different techniques that may be used to prevent cheating. Forty-six percent of students indicated that they had knowledge of students receiving help with an online exam/quiz. Overall, 75 percent of respondents indicated that the most effective technique to prevent cheating on online exams/quizzes is the use of random …

Analytics For Business, Policy And Law In A Comparative Review Of Enhanced Wireless Emergency Number Call Services Systems In The European Union And United States, James E. Holloway, Elaine Seeman, Margaret O'Hara, Arno Forst

School of Accountancy Faculty Publications and Presentations

No abstract provided.

The Value Relevance Of Value Added And Stakeholder Compensation Across Business Cultures, John Darcy

School of Accountancy Faculty Publications and Presentations

This research performed a partial test of the instrumental validity of the stakeholder model by examining the value relevance of value added relative to income and the incremental value relevance of two stakeholder compensation components of value added, wages and interest for Japan, Germany, United States, and United Kingdom.