Is it all in the Mind(fulness)? An Exploratory Study Assessing the Impact of Mindfulness on Professional Skepticism

Motivated by regulator concerns that auditors do not always demonstrate sufficient professional skepticism (hereafter skepticism); we consider whether a brief mindfulness intervention can assist. Research has demonstrated that mindfulness interventions help people focus on tasks in a range of settings. We draw on this research to predict, and find, that when novice auditors undertake a mindfulness intervention, they demonstrate greater skepticism than other novice auditors. This exploratory study provides preliminary evidence on an accessible intervention that can encourage greater skepticism.

Initial Evidence on the Market Impact of the iXBRL Adoption

In June 2018, the SEC adopted Inline eXtensible Business Reporting Language (iXBRL), which embeds XBRL data into HTML-formatted annual reports to improve the accessibility and usefulness of the information disclosures to investors. This study assesses the effectiveness of iXBRL by examining its impact on informational efficiency and information asymmetry. Using a sample that includes iXBRL voluntary adopters before 2019, we find that iXBRL adoption lowers stock return drift and facilitates information being impounded into firm stock prices following the filing of annual reports. We also find that unlike XBRL, iXBRL reduces information asymmetry in the long run. These findings are consistent with the SEC’s intention of adopting iXBRL to combine human-readable and machine-readable information. Our study provides initial evidence on the effectiveness of iXBRL in communicating information to the external users of annual reports.

Policy Uncertainty and Textual Disclosure

We study how policy uncertainty influences textual disclosure in the U.S. from 1996 to 2015. Consistent with incentives for voluntary disclosure, we find that policy uncertainty increases textual disclosure quantity, as evident in disclosure length, but lowers textual readability and increases the tone of uncertainty and negativity. We also document that the negative impact on readability subsides when firms are subject to tough external monitoring. Finally, we provide evidence implying that investors perceive such disclosure to be valuable, as evident in cheaper equity financing costs under economic policy uncertainty.

Will Someone Be Checking My Work? The Effect of Psychological Entitlement and the Expectation of Being Monitored on Task Performance and Misreporting

Psychological entitlement is a sense that one deserves more than others, and is correlated with a host of negative workplace behaviors. Because entitled individuals have a strong desire for the approval of others, we examine whether increasing the expectation of being monitored can limit some of these negative behaviors. We find that when the expectation of being monitored is low, psychological entitlement is associated with lower performance and higher misreporting. In contrast, when the expectation of being monitored is high, not only are these behaviors reduced, but performance increases and misreporting decreases for entitled individuals. Our results suggest that expectations of performance monitoring can be used to improve workplace outcomes for entitled employees.

Social Capital and Internal Control Material Weaknesses

Using a measure of social capital provided by the Northeast Regional Center for Rural Development, we document that, after controlling for auditor effort, firms headquartered in US counties with higher social capital are less likely to have ineffective internal control over financial reporting than those located in regions with lower social capital. This negative association between local social capital and ineffective internal controls holds when other forms of external monitoring are weak. We also find that the association is driven by ineffective internal control arising from entity-level, but not from account-specific, material weaknesses. Overall, we contribute to the literature that links firms' social environment with financial reporting quality.

The Pricing of IPO Audit Specialization and Subsequent Issuer Underpricing

We study the costs and benefits to the issuer of engaging an initial public offering (IPO) auditor specialist. We measure IPO auditor specialization and then find that IPO specialist auditors earn significant fee premiums relative to IPO auditors without specialization and that clients with an IPO specialist auditor exhibit lower levels of underpricing relative to clients without an IPO specialist auditor. We also demonstrate that IPO specialist auditors provide higher quality audits than IPO auditors without IPO audit specialization, finding that their IPO clients have a lower likelihood of financial misstatement and have lower discretionary accruals. Collectively, our results have important implications for the auditing profession and capital markets because we demonstrate empirical evidence of the costs and benefits of engaging IPO specialist auditors.

The Perception of Risk Disclosure Characteristics on the Credit Default Swap Market - An Automated Analysis

This paper evaluates the associations between credit default swap (CDS) spreads and risk disclosure characteristics, especially the expected qualitative and the expected quantitative impacts of risks on companies' future performance and information on risk management. We find that CDS investors can benefit from information on expected risk impacts and from information on risk management, which is important for the current discussion of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) on risk disclosure regulation. However, for companies, the disclosure of such information can be either beneficial or costly, depending on the initial risk perception of CDS investors prior to the publication of risk disclosures and on the disclosed risk factors. Furthermore, we expand the literature by automatically measuring the mentioned risk disclosure characteristics using dictionary-based approaches.

The Effects of Exposing CPAs to Rationalizations Conscious and Unconscious Outcomes

This article reports on an experimental examination of rationalization and socialization phenomenon among CPAs. Rationalizations represent the cognitive justifications that individuals use to morally disengage their internal norms. Neutralizations are rationalizations made before and influencing the decision. Socialization within an organization represents the tactics used by a corrupting influence, such as a superior providing neutralizations to persuade subordinates to be complicit in corruption. Neutralization and Socialization are fundamental first steps facilitating normalization of organizational corruption. We find that exposure to neutralizations increases unethical intentions despite cautions against falling prey to them. This result is robust to two different morally intense and practically relevant ethical cases: signing off on non-completed tasks and facilitating premature revenue recognition. We also advance evidence that for many participants the influence of provided rationalizations is unconscious. The effects of exposure to neutralizations were robust among Millennials and Gen Xers, but not among Baby Boomers.