Financial reporting fraud and other forms of financial reporting misconduct are a significant threat to the existence and efficiency of capital markets. This study reviews the literature on financial ...reporting misconduct from the perspectives of law, accounting, and finance. Our goals are to establish a common language for researchers interested in this line of research, describe the main findings and challenges in these literatures, and provide directions for future research. Although research on financial reporting misconduct faces challenges, those challenges provide significant opportunities to advance the literature, as the answers to many questions on financial reporting misconduct remain unsettled.
Experts and popular belief contend that it pays to engage in financial misconduct. We hand-collect data on three subsamples of severe misconduct cases, between 2003 and 2016: a sample of 37 (100) SEC ...enforcement actions (class action lawsuits) that explicitly allege fraud and a sample of 100 restatements with the most negative stock price reaction in which investors presumably suspect fraud. We then compare estimates of the benefits from reporting misconduct to top managers against estimates of the costs of its discovery. We find that 32.9% of perpetrators experience an overall net benefit from discovered misconduct. The percentage of officers who benefit is highest for the restatement subsample (43.5%), followed by the class action lawsuit subsample (27.7%), and is the lowest for the SEC enforcement subsample (8.1%). Stated differently, if we assume that the probability of detection is 31%, as conjectured in the literature, more than half of the perpetrators in our sample would benefit from engaging in financial reporting misconduct. Hence our evidence suggests that financial reporting misconduct can pay off for perpetrators.
We investigate an unexplored channel—loss given default (LGD)—through which accounting information can shape the design of debt contracts. Using a sample of defaulted bonds, we find that borrower ...accounting information available at contract initiation possesses significant power for predicting realized LGD at the subsequent default date. We then use this model to construct an accounting-based measure of expected LGD at the contracting date for a large sample of bond issuances. We find that this measure is positively associated with issuance date interest spread and covenant use, and document that these relations are not artifacts of an association between LGD and probability of default. We then show that accounting-based expected LGD has a stronger association with issuance date spread when the borrower’s underlying accounting is more conservative and when the accounting-based LGD predictors are more persistent. Our results increase our understanding of both the informational role and contracting role of accounting information.
Prior literature documents that both earnings announcements and management earnings forecasts increase information asymmetry at announcement. In contrast, we predict and document that analyst ...earnings forecasts decrease information asymmetry at announcement. As expected, this directional contrast is temporary, in that all three information release types lead to a decrease in information asymmetry following the short-window announcement period. Our evidence demonstrates that the direction of the effect of a public information release on announcement-period information asymmetry is determined by how the information contained in the release relates to prior information held by sophisticated and unsophisticated investors, which supports extant disclosure theory.
•We examine the effect of public information releases on information asymmetry.•Analyst forecasts decrease information asymmetry at announcement.•Earnings and management forecast announcements increase information asymmetry at announcement.•Direction of effect depends on how an information release interacts with investors׳ prior information.
The determinants of CDS spreads Galil, Koresh; Shapir, Offer Moshe; Amiram, Dan ...
Journal of banking & finance,
04/2014, Letnik:
41
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
This study proposes models that can be used as shorthand analysis tools for CDS spreads and CDS spread changes. For this purpose, we examine the determinants of CDS spreads and spread changes on a ...broad database of 718 US firms during the period from early 2002 to early 2013. Contrary to previous studies, we find that market variables have explanatory power after controlling for firm-specific variables inspired by structural models. Three explanatory variables appear to outperform the other variables examined in this paper: Stock Return, the change in stock return volatility, and the change in the median CDS spread in the rating class. We also find that models used in the event study literature to explain spread changes can be improved by adding market variables. Furthermore, we show that ratings explain cross-sectional variation in CDS spreads even after controlling for structural model variables.
ABSTRACT
This paper investigates the association between the adoption of international accounting standards and foreign investment decisions. Prior research suggests that information asymmetries ...between local and foreign investors and behavioral biases caused by unfamiliarity of the foreign markets contribute to investors preferring to invest in their home markets. Because one of the goals of the adoption of international accounting standards is to establish a high-quality, internationally familiar set of accounting standards, I predict that foreign investments will increase in countries that adopted International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) after the adoption and that this increase is driven by the familiarity of IFRS. I find that foreign equity portfolio investments (FPI) increase in countries that adopt IFRS. More importantly, I find that this relation is driven by foreign investors from countries that also use IFRS. Moreover, the effect of accounting familiarity is more pronounced when investor and investee countries share language, legal origin, culture, and region. I also find that countries with lower corruption and better investor protection experience larger increases in FPI after they adopt IFRS relative to other IFRS users. These findings are consistent with the hypothesis that familiar accounting information drives foreign investment decisions.
Despite the fact that income smoothing by managers is a pervasive phenomenon that has been widely researched, extant literature provides incomplete evidence on how smoothing is associated with cost ...of debt in general, and in the private loan market in particular. The institutional factors associated with private loan contracts, combined with the theoretical motivations for smoothing, make it unclear whether smoothing will be positively, negatively, or not associated with loan spread. Using both cross‐country and within‐country analyses on an international sample of private loans, we predict and provide evidence that income smoothing is associated with lower cost of debt when the threat of private benefits consumption by managers is low, but is associated with higher cost of debt when the threat of private benefits consumption by managers is high. We provide the first evidence in the literature that the garbling effect of smoothing can predictably dominate the signaling view of smoothing in debt contract design, and we identify private benefits consumption threat as the feature of the contracting environment that empirically reveals a sign reversal in the relationship between smoothing and cost of debt.
Motivated by methods used to evaluate the quality of data, we create a novel firm-year measure to estimate the level of error in financial statements. The measure, which has several conceptual and ...statistical advantages over available alternatives, assesses the extent to which features of the distribution of a firm’s financial statement numbers diverge from a theoretical distribution posited by Benford’s Law. After providing intuition for the theory underlying the measure, we use numerical methods to demonstrate that certain error types in financial statement numbers increase the deviation from the theoretical distribution. We corroborate the numerical analysis with simulation analysis that reveals that the introduction of errors to reported revenue also increases the deviation. We then provide empirical evidence that the measure captures financial statement data quality. We first show the measure’s association with commonly used measures of accruals-based earnings management and earnings manipulation. Next, we demonstrate that (1) restated financial statements more closely conform to Benford’s Law than the misstated versions in the same firm-year and (2) as divergence from Benford’s Law increases, earnings persistence decreases. Finally, we show that our measure predicts material misstatements as identified by SEC Accounting and Auditing Enforcement Releases and can be used as a leading indicator to identify misstatements.
We investigate the effects of dividend taxes on foreign equity portfolio holdings. Based on the extension of an equilibrium model with risky assets to an international setting, we predict that a ...change in the tax rate on dividends of a country's domestic investors is positively related to changes in foreign investors' portfolio holdings in that country. The evidence from two research settings, which exploit changes in the national tax policies of different countries, supports this prediction. More generally, the model predicts that a foreign investor's equilibrium portfolio holdings in a country are negatively related to the dividend tax rate that she directly pays on assets in that country and positively related to the weighted-average dividend tax rate of worldwide investors in that country. Results from analyses using panel data provide empirical support for these predictions.
This study shows that initiation of credit default swap (CDS) trading for an entity's debt increases the share of loans retained by loan syndicate lead arrangers and increases loan spread. These ...findings are consistent with CDS initiation reducing the effectiveness of a lead arranger's stake in the loan to serve as a mechanism to address the adverse selection and moral hazard problems in the loan syndicate. Additional findings corroborate this interpretation by revealing a moderating effect for firms with greater transparency, for loans originated by a lead arranger with a strong reputation in this market, and for firms with relatively illiquid CDS markets.
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