Springer Science and Business Media LLC

Financial reporting quality can benefit from companies and auditors using artificial intelligence (AI) in complex and subjective financial reporting areas. However, benefits will only accrue if managers incorporate AI-based information into their financial reporting decisions, which the popular press and academic literature suggest is uncertain. We use a multi-method approach to examine how financial executives view and respond to AI. In a survey, respondents describe various uses of AI at their companies, spanning from simple to complex functions. While managers are not averse to the use of AI by their companies or their auditors, they appear to be uncertain about how auditors’ use of AI will directly benefit their companies. In an experiment that manipulates whether a company and/or its auditor use AI, managers whose companies use AI record larger audit adjustments for a complex accounting estimate when the auditor uses AI. Auditor AI use does not affect managers’ adjustment decisions in the absence of company AI. This study highlights the importance of considering the effects of AI use by both companies and their auditors when evaluating how AI influences auditing and financial reporting.

This paper uses variation in real estate prices to study Chief Executive Officer (CEO) pay for luck. We distinguish between pay for luck and pay for responding to luck (action) by exploiting US GAAP accounting rules, which mandate that real estate used in the firm’s operations is not marked-to-market. This setting allows us to empirically disentangle pay for luck from pay for action, as a change in the value of real estate is only accounted for when the CEO responds to changes in property value. We show that CEO compensation is associated with the following two managerial responses to changes in real estate values: (i) real estate sales and (ii) debt issuance. Overall, we show that CEOs are rewarded for taking value-enhancing actions in response to luck.

We examine the effect of capitalization vs. expensing on UK firms’ R&D expenditures. Our investigation is motivated by the UK’s mandatory switch from UK GAAP to IFRS in 2005. Under UK GAAP, firms could elect to expense or capitalize development expenditures, but IFRS mandates capitalization. Thus, “capitalizers” maintained their accounting method, while “switchers” were required to change from expensing to capitalization. We examine the effect of the rule change on the amount of the two groups’ R&D expenditures, and we find that switching firms increased their R&D expenditures more than firms that continued to capitalize. We subject our results to numerous robustness tests, and across all of them our results support the conclusion that the accounting method affects the amount that firms invest in R&D. Our results attest to the real effects of accounting policy on firms’ R&D investments.

In the mid-2000s, the European Union adopted a number of regulatory reforms intended to increase transparency and disclosure for IPO firms, including mandating the use of International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS). The reforms also included (1) adoption of the Prospectus Directive, which mandated increased IPO prospectus disclosures and (2) increased accounting enforcement. These new regulations apply only to IPOs listing on “EU-regulated” markets; firms admitted to trading on “exchange-regulated” markets are exempt. We examine the impact of these regulations on IPO firms. For firms listing on EU-regulated markets, we find no association between IFRS and IPO underpricing; however, we find a significant decrease in IPO underpricing associated with adoption of the Prospectus Directive in countries that also increased accounting enforcement. Further, we confirm that, after 2005, most IPOs on exchange-regulated markets went public using domestic accounting standards, not IFRS. Our findings suggest that mandatory IFRS adoption did not play a major role in reducing IPO underpricing and contrast sharply with prior results, which failed to account for IPOs on exchange-regulated markets. Our evidence highlights the importance of controlling for contemporaneous changes in regulations and details of the institutional setting before attributing major economic consequences to a switch from domestic accounting standards to IFRS.

Investors, regulators, and academics question the usefulness of going concern opinions (GCOs). We assess whether GCOs provide incremental information, relative to other predictors of corporate default. Our measure of incremental information is the additional predictive power that GCOs give to a default model. Using data from 1996 to 2015, initially we find no difference in predictive power between GCOs alone and a default model that includes financial ratios. However, there is an imperfect overlap between GCOs and other predictors. We show that GCOs increase the predictive power of several models that include ratios, market variables, probability of default estimates, and credit ratings. Using a model that includes ratios and market variables, GCOs increase the number of predicted defaults by 4.4%, without increasing Type II errors. Our findings suggest that GCOs summarize a complex set of conditions not captured by other predictors of default.

The United Kingdom has recently required an expanded auditor’s report for large public companies. We investigate whether this requirement is associated with an increase in the decision usefulness of the auditor’s report and whether it has indirect consequences on audit fees and quality. Our analyses cover four years surrounding the changes, including companies that transitioned to the new regime and companies that continued issuing the previous report’s format. We do not find evidence that the regulatory change significantly affected investors’ reaction to the release of auditors’ reports, audit fees, or audit quality. Furthermore, we do not find that variation in the expanded reports’ content has affected these outcomes. Although companies with long reports pay comparatively higher fees, the mere increase in disclosure does not affect audit fees or quality. Collectively, our evidence is consistent with the expanded auditor’s report providing little incremental information to investors.

We investigate the role of bank regulatory reports in the information environments of banks. Our findings are as follows. (1) Call Reports but not FR Y-9Cs elicit economically significant stock price and volume reactions when they are publicly released, despite the fact that Call Reports usually follow earnings announcements. (2) Some of the reaction is traceable to a schedule dealing with mortgage lending and servicing. (3) The release of the Call Reports is tightly clustered around the 30th day after quarter-end. (4) After bank regulators undertook a “modernization project” to speed the processing and public dissemination of regulatory reports, the banking industry routinely experiences abnormal stock price volatility and trading volume on the 30th day of the quarter. (5) The market reaction increased after media coverage of this study. Our findings are of interest to regulators who require and monitor the reports, banks that prepare the reports, investors who may use the reports, and academics who can base research designs on the timing patterns we uncover.