In this paper, I provide two general insights that are useful in evaluating the economic trade-offs of alternative accounting measurement rules. First, when there are multiple imperfections in the world, restricting a strict subset of it need not always improve welfare. Second, a firm is not a...

A substantial literature investigates conditional conservatism, defined as asymmetric accounting recognition of economic shocks (ldquo;newsrdquo;), and how it depends on various market, political and institutional variables. Studies typically assume the Basu (1997) asymmetric timeliness...

I investigate how the use and voluntary disclosure of synthetic leases is affected by incentives to defer cash outflows and keep debt off the balance sheet. I find that managers of cash-constrained firms with incentives to defer cash payments are more likely to finance asset purchases with...

I develop a structural model to quantify the costs of tax avoidance. In the model, the firm trades off tax savings with tax-audit risk, financial-reporting benefits, and non-tax costs (which affect pre-tax income). The comparative statics suggest tax avoidance is path-dependent, which can help...

The new accounting standard requires that _nancial institutions provision for life-time expected losses on their loan portfolios. We develop a model for estimating long-term expected loan losses that incorporates a wide range of bank- and aggregate-level predictors of future losses. The model...

We find that the public disclosure of regulators' supervisory actions changes their enforcement behavior. Using a novel sample of enforcement actions and orders (EDOs) and the setting of the 1989 Financial Institutions Reform, Recovery, and Enforcement Act (FIRREA), which required public...

The accuracy of firm information disclosures and the efficiency of long-term investment both play crucial roles in the economy and capital markets. We estimate a dynamic model that captures a trade-off between these two goals that arises when managers confront realistic incentives to misreport...

This study uses a comprehensive panel of tax returns to examine the financial reporting choices of medium-to-large private U.S. firms, a setting which controls over $9 trillion in capital, vastly out-numbers public U.S. firms across all industries, yet has no financial reporting mandates. We...

Do accruals-based accounting earnings provide better information to investors about future operating cash flows than operating cash flows themselves, as predicted by FASB's conceptual framework? The most recent evidence (Nallareddy et al., 2020) is that operating cash flows, measured correctly...

We describe the process the SEC uses to make filings “publicly available.” For a sample of Form 4 (insider trade) filings, we show that, during the period we examine, the majority of filings are available to paying subscribers of the SEC's PDS feed before they are posted to the SEC website,...