ABSTRACT We study whether federal judges’ personal exposure to financial fraud affects their professional behavior, in the form of sentencing outcomes in white‐collar cases. Following the methodology outlined in our registered report, we construct a novel measure of financial fraud exposure based on judges’ direct shareholdings in firms that commit financial fraud. Using this measure, we exploit the random assignment of cases to judges to examine whether judges exposed to fraud in one firm are (1) less likely to rule in favor of defendants in white‐collar cases involving other firms and (2) less likely to grant favorable pretrial motions to defendants. We find minimal evidence in support of either (1) or (2), concluding that for all but the most serious frauds, judges are unlikely to let their personal victimhood experience affect their professional sentencing behavior with respect to related cases. Our study broadens our understanding of the spillover effects of financial fraud enforcement and contributes to the literature on how judges’ personal experiences can shape judicial decision‐making.

TRUNG NGUYEN

ANEESH RAGHUNANDAN

ALEXANDRA SCHERF

Journal of Accounting Research

How Does Judges’ Personal Exposure to Financial Fraud Affect White‐Collar Sentencing?

法官个人经历金融欺诈如何影响白领量刑？

Abstract Patent applications often reveal proprietary information to competitors, but does such disclosure harm firms or also benefit them? We develop and empirically support a theory showing that when firms patent enhancements to incumbent, nondisruptive technologies, they can cooperate more easily on these technologies, increasing their profitability. The downside of cooperating on nondisruptive technologies is that the investment in and commitment to disruptive technologies decline. To improve their commitment to disruptive technologies, some firms rely more on trade secrecy. We provide empirical support for these predictions. We document that after a patent reform that made information about patent applications widely accessible, firms cooperate more and charge higher markups. Furthermore, the nature of patented innovation has changed, with the proportion of nondisruptive patents increasing substantially. Finally, while some firms start patenting more, others patent less and rely more on trade secrecy, with the response depending on the attractiveness of firms' innovation prospects.

ARNOUD BOOT

VLADIMIR VLADIMIROV

Disclosure, Patenting, and Trade Secrecy

披露、专利与商业秘密

ABSTRACT Interest in sustainability information, from investors, managers, researchers, and others, has been expanding rapidly. We discuss recent advances and open questions related to sustainability reporting and disclosure through the lens of a supply and demand framework. Our discussion builds on prior research on financial reporting and highlights unique aspects of the provision of sustainability information.

HENRY L. FRIEDMAN

GAIZKA ORMAZABAL

The Role of Information in Building a More Sustainable Economy: A Supply and Demand Perspective

信息在构建更可持续经济中的作用：供需视角

ABSTRACT This paper studies whether firms opportunistically make proprietary claims in mandatory environmental disclosure programs with trade secret exemption rules. Examining the mandatory chemical disclosure program in the fracking industry, I find evidence of opportunistic withholding of information among operators that are less likely to have trade secrets. Specifically, I find that these operators claim fewer chemicals as trade secrets when the operating site is in close proximity to water quality monitors. This is only observed among publicly traded operators that face a higher cost of societal backlash when disclosing pollutant information. Further analyses suggest that these operators are concerned about external environmental monitoring, which deters them from opportunistic information withholding. Regarding public and private operators that are more likely to have trade secrets, I do not find strong evidence that their information withholding varies with the monitoring conditions.

YILE (ANSON) JIANG

Comply or Explain: Do Firms Opportunistically Claim Trade Secrets in Mandatory Environmental Disclosure Programs?

遵守或解释：企业在强制性环境披露计划中是否投机性地声称商业秘密？

ABSTRACT We provide prevalence estimates for five forms of earnings manipulation based on executives’ reports about their firms’ actual reporting practices. After preregistering our methods and analyses via the Journal of Accounting Research ’s registration‐based editorial process, we recruit nearly a thousand executives from firms listed in the Russell 3000 Index to participate in either a survey or a list experiment; the hallmark of the latter being additional privacy protections designed to promote honest disclosure about self‐incriminating information. In our survey, 26.8% of executives disclose at least one form of earnings manipulation at their firm in the 2018–2023 period: 18.0% report changing an operational activity to meet a near‐term earnings target at the expense of long‐term value (i.e., real earnings management), 8.8% report intentionally obfuscating unfavorable information, 6.6% report manipulating accruals, 3.9% report withholding material information, and 0.0% report accounting fraud. Our list experiment produces an economically higher result in two cases, estimating that 29.9% of firms engaged in real earnings management and 12.4% committed accounting fraud over the same time period. We conclude that while a traditional survey can provide credible lower‐bound estimates for the prevalence of many forms of earnings manipulation, list experiments encourage more honest disclosure in some cases.

NICOLE L. CADE

JOSHUA L. GUNN

ALEX J. VANDENBERG

Measuring the Prevalence of Earnings Manipulations: A Novel Approach

衡量盈余操纵普遍性的新方法

ABSTRACT Examining test statistics from articles in six leading accounting journals, we detect discontinuities in their distributions around conventional significance thresholds ( p‐ values of 0.05 and 0.01) and find an unusual abundance of test statistics that are just significant. Further analysis reveals that these discontinuities are more prominent in studies with smaller samples and are more salient in experimental than in archival studies. The discontinuity discrepancy between experimental and archival studies relates to several proxies for researcher degrees of freedom. Nevertheless, this evidence does not imply that experimental research is more prone to questionable research practices than archival studies. Overall, our findings speak to the concern of whether accounting researchers could exercise undisclosed discretion to obtain and report statistically significant results. Based on our results, a healthy skepticism of some just‐significant test statistics is warranted.

XIN CHANG

HUASHENG GAO

WEI LI

Discontinuous Distribution of Test Statistics Around Significance Thresholds in Empirical Accounting Studies

实证会计研究中检验统计量在显著性阈值附近的非连续分布

ABSTRACT This paper examines how firms’ tax policy expectations (TPE) evolve around and relate to their investment responses to changes in tax policy. Using a text‐based approach to measuring TPE, we find that two recent tax policy–changing events—namely, the 2016 U.S. presidential election and the enactment of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA)—spawned considerable between‐ and within‐firm variation in TPE, with aggregate time‐series patterns in TPE occasionally challenging prevailing assumptions in previous research. Further, we observe that event‐induced TPE relate to investment both before and in response to the TCJA's passage in 2017, with offsetting associations between its first and second moments, and that these TPE moderate the TCJA's intended investment‐stimulating effect. Furthermore, we document a difference between domestic and multinational firms in their TPE‐investment response, with the former (latter) more likely to adjust the level (shift the country location) of their investment. Overall, our findings support the idea that TPE can impact investment behavior in the face of a tax policy change and suggest that our methodology can be used by future research to incorporate TPE into analyses of tax policy effects.

John Gallemore

Stephan Hollander

Martin Jacob

Xiang Zheng

Tax Policy Expectations and Investment

税收政策预期与投资

Stakeholders in the Chapter 11 reorganization process face significant information uncertainty about the post‐emergence prospects of the firm. The U.S. Bankruptcy Code requires a debtor to provide a disclosure statement containing “adequate information” about its financial status and a proposed reorganization plan but stops short of rigidly defining the adequacy standard. We document the heterogeneity in disclosure statement information across 16 distinct attributes and examine the variation in disclosures along several dimensions that reflect agency costs and coordination problems. We observe that Chapter 11 disclosure correlates more with claimant‐ and case‐specific characteristics than pre‐bankruptcy debtor characteristics. Our results illustrate the importance of institutional features in specific disclosure settings such as bankruptcy court filings. The research questions and methods of this study were registered via theJournal of Accounting Research’s registration‐based editorial process.

Ilona Bastiaansen

Alina Lerman

Frank Murphy

Dushyant Vyas

J of Accounting Research

Court Disclosures of Firms in Chapter 11 Bankruptcy*

《第11章破产中企业的法院披露》

ABSTRACT We explore whether firms internalize the product market concerns of their economically linked peers by examining merger and acquisition decisions in the context of customer–supplier relations. Given the extensive transfer of capital, knowledge, and information between merging parties, we hypothesize that customers’ competition concerns discourage their suppliers from engaging in vertically conflicted transactions (i.e., acquisitions of their customers’ rivals or suppliers to those rivals). Consistent with our hypothesis, we find that suppliers are less likely to engage in such transactions when their customers are subject to higher product market competition. Moreover, the effect is more pronounced when suppliers and customers have greater relationship‐specific investments and when customers face heightened proprietary information concerns. Using plausibly exogenous variation in common ownership between customers and their rivals as a shock to customers’ competition concerns, we conclude that the link between customers’ competition concerns and supplier acquisitions is likely causal. Our findings suggest that firms alter their investment and strategic decisions in response to the product market competition concerns of their economically related peers.

FARZANA AFRIN

JINHWAN KIM

SUGATA ROYCHOWDHURY

BENJAMIN P. YOST

Internalizing Peer Firm Product Market Concerns: Supply Chain Relations and M&amp;A Activity

内化同行企业产品市场关注：供应链关系与并购活动

ABSTRACT We study environmental and social (E&amp;S) disclosures in annual reports. Using the word embedding model to examine over 210,000 annual reports from 24,271 public firms in 30 international countries/regions between 2001 and 2020, we create an E&amp;S dictionary that allows us to document trends in annual report E&amp;S disclosure. Specifically, we find: (1) increases in length and boilerplate language and (2) decreases in specificity. Our results also suggest that E&amp;S disclosure quality improves after the adoption of voluntary ESG reporting frameworks but deteriorates after disclosure mandates. Our findings provide systematic evidence on the evolution of E&amp;S disclosure in annual reports over the past two decades and shed light on how voluntary and mandatory standards have shaped global E&amp;S reporting practices.

Yan Lin

Rui Shen

Jasmine Wang

Y. Julia Yu

Global Evolution of Environmental and Social Disclosure in Annual Reports<sup>*</sup>

年度报告中环境和社会披露的全球演变<sup>*</sup>

The Journal of Accounting Research is a general-interest accounting journal.  It publishes original research in all areas of accounting and related fields that utilizes tools from basic disciplines such as economics, statistics, psychology, and sociology.  This research typically uses analytical, empirical archival, experimental, and field study methods and addresses economic questions, external and internal, in accounting, auditing, disclosure, financial reporting, taxation, and information as well as related fields such as corporate finance, investments, capital markets, law, contracting, and information economics.

The Journal of Accounting Research is a general-interest accounting journal that publishes original research across all areas of accounting and related fields. This research employs tools from basic disciplines such as economics, statistics, psychology, and sociology. It typically utilizes analytical, empirical archival, experimental, and field study methods to address economic questions in accounting, auditing, disclosure, financial reporting, taxation, and related fields such as corporate finance, investments, capital markets, law, contracting, and information economics.

《Journal of Accounting Research》是一本综合性会计期刊，致力于发表各个领域的原创研究，涵盖会计及相关领域。该期刊的研究通常运用经济学、统计学、心理学和社会学等基础学科的工具，采用分析性、实证归档、实验和实地研究等方法，探讨会计、审计、信息披露、财务报告、税务等领域的经济问题，以及与企业财务、投资、资本市场、法律、合同和信息经济学等相关的领域。

期刊	Journal of Accounting Research
ISSN	0021-8456, 1475-679X
h-index	169
Journal Impact	4.85
国际分区	BUSINESS, FINANCE(Q1)
国内分区	管理学(2区)管理学商业财政与金融(1区)