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Open Access
Accounting and Accountability in the Field of Social Services - A Multi-level Investigation
(2018-03-01) Chawla, Akhila; Neu, Dean
Roberts (1991, p.355) remarked that the analysis of accounting in systems of accountability (also) offers alternative ways to conceive of the transformation of accounting. This dissertation aims to improve multi-level understanding of accounting and accountability within the field of social services. Focusing on Indias Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS), one of the worlds largest social services programs, I examine the role of accounting in accountability practices and change processes at macro, meso and micro levels. Current social services literature, straddling public, private and third sectors, reveals accounting-accountability research to be underexplored (Bracci & Llewellyn, 2012) and conspicuously lacking in diversity of research sites, yet undergoing significant change (Ebrahim, 2003; Brinkerhoff & Brinkerhoff, 2004; Llewellyn, 1997; Walz & Ramachandran, 2011). This facilitates a unique set of observations and understandings as program delivery and implementation evolve. This dissertation specifically uses Bourdieus notions of field, habitus and capitals, also linking to literatures on management control systems, budgeting, routines and sense-making. Following the unfolding of MGNREGS over eight years, I raise two main research questions: How are accounting practices and artifacts intentionally enlisted in MGNERGS towards notions of accountability across multiple levels of program governance? What role do accounting practices in MGNREGS play in larger organizational and social change processes? I examine accountings enlistment in an enabling role to frame and diffuse accountability and program structure on a macro level; in a strategical role, to construct accountability at the meso level; and in a learning and sense-making role to implement accountability at the micro level, where the programs accounting and accountability practices intersect with rural villages. My analysis argues that accounting can be mobilized towards emergent change processes both within public organizations and wider social practices to impact the daily lives of underprivileged rural citizens. In MGNREGS, accounting as an organizational and social practice is not only shaped by organizational objectives but also in turn shapes these objectives and the fields material structure, players, powers, logics and habitus. Accounting practices are, thus, an important part of the ordering, (re)organizing and multi-level change processes in the field of social services in India.
Open Access
Accounting and Money Laundering
(2020-05-11) Maharaj, Gajindranath; Neu, Dean
This study sheds light on some aspects of money laundering and the role of accounting by examining how does money laundering persist and continue to increase or go undetected for extended periods of time given the institutional settings of increasing regulation, increasing monitoring and control systems at financial institutions, and increasing attention by accounting professionals. The study consists of three individual papers all connected to the common theme of accounting and money laundering. This area of research is important for several reasons. First, the problem of money laundering is a global problem, it occurs in both developed and developing countries, and in some cases, money is moved across borders to be laundered. The propagation of money laundering facilities furthers criminal activity. One of the aims of this research program is to help shed light on the mechanisms and practices used to facilitate money laundering, with a focus on accounting techniques. Second, the research seeks to understand what happens within financial institutions, and how their systems and processes, given the tight controls, allow money to be laundered. Third, does anti-money-laundering regulation deter money laundering activity? This research agenda has implications beyond the research community. By understanding how money laundering strategies work, how accounting is implicated, and the impact of regulators and regulation, the research can be used to help prevent and detect money being launderedwhich can then lead to a reduction in the crimes that generate the proceeds to be laundered.
Open Access
Accounting and Performance Metrics in the Baseball Industry
(2021-11-15) Nappert, Pier-Luc; Neu, Dean
This doctoral thesis explores the roles of accounting and performance metrics in the baseball industry, a sport characterized by significant income inequalities amongst players. I entered the field with a broad research question, trying to understand how accounting mechanisms and technologies influence the decision-making processes of Major League Baseball organizations related to the evaluation, acquisition and monitoring of high-profile employees, namely baseball players. This work begins with Chapter II, which examines how new technologies, such as data analytics and camera-based tracking systems, have changed performance measurement and management control systems in the industry. It illustrates that these technological devices have impacted the temporality of performance metrics and have transitioned the industry toward a "society of control" (Deleuze, 1992). In Chapter III, I explore how baseball operations specialists translate player evaluations into player valuations, notably with financialized valuation methods. However, the chapter also illustrates that the valuations of players' contracts are debated by clubs' accounting executives, who claim that such valuations are not consistent with the "reality" of accounting. By exploring the interplay between valuation and accounting, this chapter illustrates how "hyperreality" (Baudrillard, 1994) is a core feature of sports accounting, which is strategically displayed by clubs' owners in their communications with key stakeholders. Finally, in Chapter IV, I explore the technologies and rationalities underlying human capital contracts, new financial products available to underpaid minor league players, and how these contracts change participants' subjectivity. I demonstrate that human capital contracts enable participants to foresee a brighter future and that they act as a coping device by providing an escapist form of imagination. Taken together, the three chapters show how baseball players are transformed into human "assets," in part by being financialized by their employer but also by contributing to their own financialization.
Open Access
Analysts' Risk Discussions and the Use of Valuation Models: A Content Analysis of Sell-Side Equity Analyst Reports
(2021-11-15) Yu, Changqiu; Kanagaretnam, Kiridaran
This dissertation consists of three research studies on sell-side equity analysts based on textual analysis of analyst reports from Investext. In the first study, I examine whether analysts' geographic location is associated with their discussions about risk. Using textual analysis of analysts' reports to extract their risk discussions for firms globally, I find that foreign analysts present more risk discussions than local analysts. Foreign analysts' more extensive risk discussions are associated with their unfamiliarity with the underlying firms. Analysts' risk discussions are incrementally informative to investors. The informativeness of risk discussions is similar for foreign analysts and local analysts. The second study examines whether comparability of the underlying firms to their peers affects the informativeness of discounted cash flow (DCF) models and price-to-earnings (PE) models used by analysts. I hypothesize that analysts are more likely to be subject to anchoring and adjustment bias when using PE models compared with using DCF models. The bias is more severe when the underlying firms are not comparable to other firms. Consistent with this argument, I find that market reactions to analysts' investment opinions based on DCF models are stronger than their opinions based on PE models. Furthermore, the incremental effect of DCF models on market reactions to analyst investment opinions is mainly restricted to firms with less comparability. In the third study, I use textual analysis to detect analysts' use of valuation models for a large sample of analyst reports on firms around the world. I classify these models into accrual models and cash flow models. Given the fact that accrual models are the default models used in analyst reports, I examine whether the firm country's institutional factors are associated with analysts' choice of cash flow models. I find that analysts are more likely to use cash flow models to value firms in countries with stronger investor protection, better information environment, and greater economic freedom. The market reactions to target price changes based on cash flow models are stronger, particularly in countries with a stronger institutional environment. The findings suggest that countries with sound institutions facilitate analysts' use of cash flow models.
Open Access
Debt, Neoliberalism, and Accounting
(2020-08-11) Gilbert, Christine; Everett, Jeffery S.
The present doctoral thesis aims to explore the roles and limitations of accounting, in the broadest sense and including auditing, in financialized neoliberalism where indebtedness, through personal and public debt, has become central to governing the population. To achieve this objective, this research explores these two levels of debt, namely personal and public, and addresses the following research question: What are the roles of accounting and its impacts on the phenomenon of debt as a disciplinary and control device? This work begins with Chapter II, which examines one way of constructing indebted subjects and illustrates that, at the individual level, vague and imprecise accounting processes can play a determining role in disciplining them to become financially responsible and financialized subjects, through the generation of emotions such as fear, shame, and anxiety. Subsequently, Chapter III shows the construction of a discourse advocating the absolute priority of debt repayment (over the needs of the population), and demonstrates how organic intellectuals who want to resist this dictate are trying to organize themselves to defuse it. This study reveals that accounting can make their task more difficult given its complexity, especially in regards to debating public debt in the public space. The paper invites organic intellectuals to get out of the accounting complexity trap, either by drawing on the common sense as highlighted by Sikka (2000), or by translating accounting concepts into other fields, such as in the environment, in order to also get in touch with the population on an emotional level rather than just a rational level. This thesis ends on a more positive note in Chapter IV, which examines a case where accounting, and more specifically auditing, helped a small Third World country to reverse the power dynamic with international holders of financial capital. The audit, which was mobilized in the Ecuadorian governments strategy to renegotiate its public debt at its advantage, offered an alternative narrative to create an accountability relationship that did not previously exist, contributed to creating a sense of fear among investors, and provided legitimacy in the eyes of some stakeholders regarding the renegotiation of the countrys debt.
Open Access
Essays on Corporate Intangibles and Misconduct
(2018-08-27) Au, Shiu-Yik; Dong, Ming
This dissertation examines three different aspects of corporate intangibles or misconduct and their impact on firms. The first essay examines the impact of employee flexibility on firm value, the second essay examines whether the SEC can deter financial misconduct through its enforcement, and the third essay examines the impact of mandating risk disclosure on firm innovation. In the first essay, I hypothesize that employee flexibility enhances firm value because a flexible and empowered workforce helps the firm to respond to exogenous shocks. I estimate employee flexibility scores through textual analysis of online job reviews and I find that a high employee flexibility score leads to superior stock returns, especially for firms with high exposure to exogenous risk. In the second essay, I examine whether the Securities and Exchange Commissions (SEC) enforcement actions, and who these actions target, deter future financial misconduct. An enforcement action reduces the incidence of misconduct in other firms in the same industry and metropolitan statistical area (MSA) in the future. Furthermore, an enforcement that punishes a guilty company has a larger deterrence effect on future misconduct than punishing an officer, auditor, attorney, or other entity. Finally, in the third essay, I test whether mandatory risk disclosure reduces firm innovation. Based on text analysis of risk disclosure in 10-K filings for over 44,000 firm-years, I find that an increase in disclosed risk is linked to a decline in research and development, patents filed, and citation-weighted value of patents. Furthermore, by exploiting two natural experiments and a regression discontinuity design, I am able to show that mandatory disclosure of risk in the 10-K exacerbates the effect. The mechanism for this negative association with innovation appears to be linked to firms financial constraints; firms with financial constraints experience even larger declines in innovation when risk disclosure is high than other firms. These results show that increased disclosure requirements can have a negative impact on some firms.
Open Access
Global Tax Transparency and Tax Behaviour: Empirical Evidence for the Effects of Country-By-Country Reporting on Tax Avoidance and Income Shifting
(2020-08-11) Joshi, Preetika; Mawani, Amin
Tax transparency and exchange of information are at the heart of a global effort to tackle aggressive tax planning of multinational corporations (MNCs). Policymakers worldwide, including within the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, the G20 nations, the European Union, the Financial Accounting Standard Board, and the United Nations, have strived to enhance tax disclosures. Even with this push for global tax transparency, evidence is lacking about whether regulations achieve the desired effects. This dissertation examines the corporate tax avoidance and income shifting of European Union MNCs following the adoption of two transparency rules: private country-by-country reporting under Action Item 13 of OECDs base-erosion and profit-shifting project and public country-by-country reporting under Capital Requirements Directive IV. In examining response to private country by country reporting, I document no significant difference in tax-motivated income shifting in the three-year post-adoption period. However, starting in 2018, I find that affiliates of European Union MNCs engaged in significantly less profit shifting. I also find robust evidence of an increase in effective tax rates of European Union MNCs subject to private country by country reporting. Overall these results suggest that, while the introduction of private country by country reporting led to a significant decline in firm-level tax avoidance, the impact on affiliate-level income shifting has been limited. In examining the effects of public country-by-country reporting, I document a significant decrease in the income shifting by the industrial affiliates of European multinational banks subject to the disclosure requirements. The findings of this study have important policy implications for the global implementation of country-by-country reporting and extend the debate on public versus private disclosure of tax information.
Open Access
Materializing Performance: The Interactions that Enact Inclusions, Exclusions and Arrangements in Charity Social Performance Reports
(2018-03-01) Ruff, Katherine Young; Neu, Dean
The accounting concept materiality is theorized then elaborated in two empirical studies. Materiality is theorized as a performative enactment of entangled objects and idealities that in turn influences which objects and idealities come to matter. Theorized in this way, materiality is not understood as judgements of human preparers and auditors, but a material-discursive practice interacting with agentive objects (such as templates and information technologies) and idealities (including professional norms). Inscriptions in accounting systems and public-facing reports are the traces of these interactions, which collectively constitute a text that is itself an entanglement of matter and meaning, and that itself enacts an ongoing becoming of what matters. The theorization of materiality is elaborated in the context of charity reporting on social (mission-related) performance. Materiality in charity reporting is a pressing question in its own right, and a useful context in which to bring visibility to materiality concepts that are taken-for-given in financial accounting contexts. The first study elaborates how things come to matter, and not matter, examining social performance reporting in charity annual accounts from 1865 to 2014. It focuses on the interactions of templates, expertise and printing technology in the inclusions, exclusions and arrangements of performance information in charity annual reports. The second study interrogates the differences in materiality by comparing six reports, each based on the same performance measures from a real charity. It focuses on the interactions of templates and prior inscriptions in the differential materializations. A final essay develops policy recommendations in light of the new theorization of materiality by reconsidering the idea of the reasonable investor and elaborating the concept of the reasonable donor.
Open Access
The Incremental Information Content of Analysts' Research Reports and Firms' Annual Reports: Evidence from Textual Analysis
(2019-11-22) Park, June Woo; Tsang, Albert
This dissertation consists of three essays, investigating the properties of analysts research reports and firms annual reports, and their impact on capital markets using textual analysis methods. The first essay studies the validity of analyst report length, measured by page count, as a proxy for analysts research effort. Specifically, I find that longer reports are positively associated with recommendation upgrades more than downgrades, and with forecast accuracy. I further document an asymmetric market reaction to longer upgrades as compared to the same length downgrades. The findings support my hypothesis that by providing more and accurate information, analysts exert credibility-enhancing effort on their upgrades, as these are perceived by investors to be more optimistic and less credible than downgrades. The study suggests differing interpretations of analyst vs. annual report length as a proxy. In a second textual analysis essay, I examine the determinants of environmental disclosures (ED) in U.S. 10-Ks (i.e. annual reports) and its impact on a future stock price crash risk. I provide crucial evidence that ED is related to bad news (i.e. news that tends to be obfuscated by managers) by showing the autocorrelation of its change over time and its negative association with short-term market reaction. In the long run, however, an increase in ED shows a lower likelihood of significant stock price drops. The results are consistent with the notion that firms benefit from non-financial information disclosure. A third textual analysis essay compares the value of private versus public information sources in U.S. analysts earnings forecasts. Using a pattern search algorithm (i.e., regular expression) on the headlines of earnings forecasts, I find that additional private sources of information are associated with less forecast error, triggering greater market reaction. Moreover, I document that the combination of management and non-management private information sources minimizes forecast error and maximizes market reaction. Finally, I show that more accurate and informative forecasts are made by analysts who make greater efforts to access private information sources, even when they do not have other information advantages (e.g. brokerage firm reputation). Thus, I provide new insight into the determinants of forecast properties.
Open Access
The Influence of Affect Regulation on Professional Skepticism
(2023-03-28) Osecki, Errol David; Thorne, Linda
Variances in professional skepticism are a primary cause of audit deficiencies, and thus understanding how these variations happen is of keen interest to practitioners, standard-setter, and regulators so that they can better manage professional skepticism. To this end, academics have created successively more explanatory professional skepticism models. One factor known to cause variations in professional skepticism is affect, yet how it causes these variations is still not understood as the most current models cannot explain why negative affect has been found to both increase and decrease professional skepticism. The purpose of this dissertation is to build a more explanatory model of professional skepticism with respect to affect by asking and answering the question, how does affect produce variations in professional skepticism? To answer the question, I first conduct a review of professional skepticism literature and relevant affect literature to identify affect regulation as a notable theory currently excluded from professional skepticism models. Affect regulation predicts people anticipate affect as it is being generated and change their behaviour to either up- or down-regulate the affect in service of some goal. This is notable as it can explain the contradictory results with respect to negative affect and professional skepticism observed in the literature. I further investigate this with an interview study, the results of which further support the inclusion of affect regulation into a new model of professional skepticism. Then, these insights are combined to create a new model of professional skepticism. Finally, I calibrate the model with an online experiment, the results of which fail to find significant results. Taken together, the new model of professional skepticism developed herein better explains how variations in professional skepticism occur and is of use to those looking to better manage affect to optimize professional skepticism.
Open Access
Three Essays on the Influence of Climate Change on Corporate Behaviors
(2022-12-14) Zhang, Lei; Kanagaretnam, Kiridaran
This dissertation follows the “three papers” dissertation model. It consists of three independent papers but with a related theme focusing on the capital market effects of climate change. The macroeconomic effects of climate change have been well documented in the literature, however, less is known about how climate change influences economic activities at the micro level. The dissertation fills this gap in and contributes to the literature by exploring the influence of climate disasters on firms’ information environment, and the influence of climate change social norms on firms’ cash holding behaviors and conditional conservatism.
Open Access
Voluntary Disclosure and Corporate Innovation: Evidence from Management Earnings Forecasts
(2021-11-15) San, Ziyao; Kanagaretnam, Kiridaran
This research consists of two parts. In the first part, I examine whether a firm whose chief executive officer (CEO) is more future-oriented (as measured by commitment to voluntary disclosure practices, i.e., issuing more frequent and more disaggregated earnings forecasts) is likely to be more successful in corporate innovation investment. Using a global sample of 26,364 firms from 27 countries and a single-country sample of 8,980 firms (domiciled in the US), I find that firms with more future-oriented CEO are granted more patents and receive more citations per patent. The results of additional cross-sectional analyses indicate that the relationship between commitments to voluntary disclosure and corporate innovation varies with various CEO-, firm-, and country-level factors. In the second part of this research, I investigate the role of CEOs personality traits in corporate innovation and in the association between commitment to voluntary disclosure and corporate innovation. I find that firms with more extraverted CEOs tend to be more successful in their innovation investment in the future and that the signaling role of commitment to voluntary disclosure in corporate innovation success is more pronounced in firms with more extraverted CEOs. My findings also indicate that voluntary disclosure by more extraverted CEOs attracts more investor attention. Collectively, the results of this research support the conjecture that future-oriented CEOs are likely to commit to voluntary disclosure practices to signal their ability to manage uncertainties associated with innovation investment and thereby achieve innovation success. Additionally, such signaling tends to be driven by more extraverted CEOs. This research should be important for the investors and other stakeholders, as it shows how the likelihood of firms future innovation success can be inferred from CEOs observable earnings forecasting behavior. The findings may also be of interest to firms, as they highlight the importance of considering candidates level of extraversion when hiring a CEO. Finally, the findings of this research should be helpful to policymakers who develop initiatives to enhance firms voluntary financial disclosure, because this research highlights how the effectiveness of management earnings forecasts in signaling corporate innovation success varies with country-level institutional characteristics.

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