Zining Li , James M. Plečnik , Wendy Wilson , Suning Zhang
{"title":"Stock option expense recognition and the cost of equity","authors":"Zining Li , James M. Plečnik , Wendy Wilson , Suning Zhang","doi":"10.1016/j.adiac.2025.100835","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.adiac.2025.100835","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>This study examines whether recognizing an expense on the face of the financial statements affects the cost of equity capital. Specifically, we analyze cost of equity effects around the change in accounting treatment imposed by Statement of Financial Accounting Standards 123R (SFAS 123R). This standard requires the recognition of an expense for the fair value of employee stock option grants, while previously this information was disclosed in financial statement footnotes. We find that, while pre-SFAS 123R firms benefited from a relatively lower cost of equity from option grants, once expense recognition was required, the benefit was diminished. While various possible explanations for this result exist, our additional analyses suggest that a decline in accounting information quality drives our results. Further, we find that the impact of SFAS 123R was greater for firms operating in technology-focused industries, likely due to their heavy use of stock options.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":46906,"journal":{"name":"Advances in Accounting","volume":"69 ","pages":"Article 100835"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2025-06-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144489657","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Pre-restatement executive turnovers and investor reactions","authors":"Zhen Zhang , Brent Lao , Jin Dong Park","doi":"10.1016/j.adiac.2025.100832","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.adiac.2025.100832","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>This study investigates the relation between fraudulent financial restatements and executive turnovers prior to the public announcement of the restatements. We find that restating firms are significantly more likely to experience CEO or CFO turnovers before restatement announcements, suggesting that firms take proactive actions in response to financial misreporting. The turnover likelihood is higher for CEOs than CFOs. Our analysis also reveals that investors react negatively to pre-restatement CFO turnovers, but the reactions to CEO turnovers are insignificant. This finding suggests that investors perceive CFO turnovers as indicative of undisclosed financial reporting issues, while CEO turnovers convey mixed signals to investors when there is a lack of clear reasons behind the turnovers. Further, our results show that at the time of the subsequent restatement announcement, firms with pre-restatement CEO turnovers experience more pronounced negative abnormal returns, a pattern not observed with CFO turnovers. Additionally, analysis of year-to-year change in discretionary accruals indicates that pre-restatement turnovers do not immediately enhance financial reporting quality. Overall, our study fills a gap in existing literature by demonstrating how the timing of executive turnovers around significant business events affects investor reactions to both the turnover and subsequent business events.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":46906,"journal":{"name":"Advances in Accounting","volume":"69 ","pages":"Article 100832"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2025-06-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144270113","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Increasing attention to disconfirming information in the audit environment when time pressure promotes confirmation of client assertions","authors":"Mary P. Durkin , Jacob M. Rose","doi":"10.1016/j.adiac.2025.100833","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.adiac.2025.100833","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>According to the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (PCAOB), incentives and pressures found in the audit environment can cause unconscious biases to dominate decision making and lead auditors to underutilize evidence that disconfirms management's claims and assertions (PCAOB 2012; PCAOB 2019). This study investigates the activation of a counterfactual mindset to mitigate the adverse effects of time pressure on confirmation bias in the audit environment. Findings from an experiment with accounting students indicate that when incentive structures create significant time pressure, novice auditors are less likely to attend to evidence that disconfirms management's assertions. However, priming participants with a counterfactual mindset can overcome some of the adverse effects of time pressure by increasing attention to disconfirming evidence and perceptions that disconfirming evidence is important and useful for evaluating management's assertions. Activating a counterfactual mindset encourages the search for and use of disconfirming information when time pressures create biases against the consideration of disconfirming evidence. The results suggest the need to further investigate the potential benefits of counterfactual mindsets in the audit context.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":46906,"journal":{"name":"Advances in Accounting","volume":"69 ","pages":"Article 100833"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2025-06-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144270390","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Discussion of “increasing attention to disconfirming information in the audit environment when time pressure promotes confirmation of client assertions”","authors":"Lei Gao","doi":"10.1016/j.adiac.2025.100834","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.adiac.2025.100834","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":46906,"journal":{"name":"Advances in Accounting","volume":"69 ","pages":"Article 100834"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2025-06-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144254035","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
James Jianxin Gong , Nian Lim Lee (Vic) , Sophia I. Wang
{"title":"Do shareholders vote against executive compensation when pay is misaligned with performance?","authors":"James Jianxin Gong , Nian Lim Lee (Vic) , Sophia I. Wang","doi":"10.1016/j.adiac.2025.100821","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.adiac.2025.100821","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Using the most recently available data on compensation actually paid (CAP) to CEOs and non-CEO executives, we document a strong and positive relationship between CAP-based pay-performance misalignment and shareholder Say-on-pay (SOP) votes against executive compensation (SOP dissent). The positive relationship between CAP-based misalignment and SOP dissent is stronger when equity constitutes a greater portion of compensation and is weaker when total shareholder return is used to determine CEO non-equity incentive payout. The findings are robust to the use of alternative measures of CAP-based pay-performance misalignment and SOP dissent as well as to the use of an entropy-balanced sample. In contrast, when pay-performance misalignment is based on summary compensation table (SCT) pay, we find an insignificant relationship between pay-performance misalignment and SOP dissent. Overall, we find strong empirical support that shareholders consider CAP-based pay-performance misalignment when casting their SOP votes.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":46906,"journal":{"name":"Advances in Accounting","volume":"69 ","pages":"Article 100821"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2025-06-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144212249","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Auditor professional skepticism and deferred tax asset valuation allowance","authors":"Xiao Song, Ming (Mike) Yuan","doi":"10.1016/j.adiac.2025.100820","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.adiac.2025.100820","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>In response to calls for more research on whether auditors exercise sufficient professional skepticism when evaluating subjective evidence, we examine whether auditors are professionally skeptical toward their clients' estimates of deferred tax asset valuation allowance (VA). Our findings indicate that, on average, auditors are not sufficiently skeptical of VA estimates when assessing a client's going-concern status. Specifically, auditors tend to exhibit over-reliance on clients' VA estimates, relative to the VA's association with subsequent bankruptcy. However, auditors with industry or tax expertise, and those from Big 4 auditors exhibit greater professional skepticism toward the VA. In addition, using the collapse of Arthur Andersen as a plausibly exogenous shock, we find that successor auditors who took over former clients of Arthur Andersen demonstrate more professional skepticism toward the VA than Arthur Andersen did. Overall, our study suggests that auditors are overly reliant on management-provided estimates in going-concern decisions and offers potential channels for improvement.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":46906,"journal":{"name":"Advances in Accounting","volume":"68 ","pages":"Article 100820"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2025-05-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144124479","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Auditing trade credit risk: Evidence from BAPCPA and COVID-19","authors":"Stephanie Walton , Yiyang Zhang (Ian)","doi":"10.1016/j.adiac.2025.100819","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.adiac.2025.100819","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>We examine how auditors assess trade credit risk. While trade credit is an increasingly common financing tool, it is not uncommon for trade credit to become past due, increasing a supplier's own financial risks. We use two events reflecting regulatory and global sources of variation in trade credit risk: BAPCPA's strengthening of creditor protections and the COVID-19 pandemic's supply chain disruptions. Using a difference-in-difference design, we find that post-BAPCPA auditors levy lower audit fees on suppliers whose customers exhibit greater trade credit risk, reflecting the greater certainty surrounding regulatory enhancement of creditor protections. We further find that post-COVID-19 auditors levy higher audit fees on suppliers whose customers exhibit greater trade credit risk. We then investigate the role of supply chain risks in addition to audit effort and audit quality implications. Overall, we find evidence that auditors account for trade credit risk in audit pricing.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":46906,"journal":{"name":"Advances in Accounting","volume":"68 ","pages":"Article 100819"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2025-05-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144108205","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Climate policy uncertainty and analyst forecast quality for greenhouse gas-intensive firms","authors":"K.C. Lin , Xiaobo Dong","doi":"10.1016/j.adiac.2025.100817","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.adiac.2025.100817","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>This study examines the impact of climate policy uncertainty (CPU) on financial analysts' ability to forecast the performance of greenhouse-gas (GHG)-intensive firms. We measure CPU using the <span><span>Gavriilidis (2021)</span></span> CPU index, which we validate by confirming its correlation with climate-related legislative activities and its distinction from general economic uncertainty indices. Our findings reveal that CPU negatively impacts forecast quality, increasing dispersion and reducing accuracy, especially for long-term earnings forecasts. Political gridlock, characterized by a divided government and ideological polarization in Congress, mitigates the negative effects of CPU. Furthermore, GHG-intensive firms with higher-quality financial disclosures and those followed by more skilled analysts experience less deterioration in forecast quality due to CPU. Finally, GHG-intensive firms that increase climate-related discussions during earnings calls in periods of high CPU mitigate the adverse impact on forecast quality.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":46906,"journal":{"name":"Advances in Accounting","volume":"68 ","pages":"Article 100817"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2025-04-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143886482","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Islamic worldview, social consciousness, and socially responsible investment","authors":"Ahmad Usman Shahid , Chris Patel , Peipei Pan","doi":"10.1016/j.adiac.2025.100815","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.adiac.2025.100815","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>We conducted a scenario-based survey and examine whether and how professional accountants and junior business executives' socially responsible investment (SRI) decisions are influenced by their intrinsic Islamic religiosity measured by the Islamic worldview in the context of a profitable firm that is alleged by the media to have employed child labour under hazardous conditions in Pakistan. Our findings show that professionals' Islamic worldview is positively associated with their SRI decisions, and it is mediated by their social consciousness. Our results further show that social consciousness correlates to how they perceive media allegations as relevant in making decisions. We demonstrate that the conventional theory of accounting, which suggests that considerations of risk and return primarily drive investing decisions, does not always hold true. Our findings demonstrate that professionals are guided by their Islamic worldview in making SRI decisions that transcend those with profit-maximizing motives with a focus on a risk-return trade-off.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":46906,"journal":{"name":"Advances in Accounting","volume":"68 ","pages":"Article 100815"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2025-04-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143847626","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Discussion of “balance sheet strength in the oil and gas industry: Saving for a rainy day or making hay while the sun shines”","authors":"James N. Cannon","doi":"10.1016/j.adiac.2025.100814","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.adiac.2025.100814","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":46906,"journal":{"name":"Advances in Accounting","volume":"68 ","pages":"Article 100814"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2025-04-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143838536","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}