Brad A. Badertscher

Externalities of Public Firm Presence: Evidence from Private Firms’ Investment Decisions

Public firms provide a large amount of information through their disclosures. In addition, information intermediaries publicly analyze, discuss and disseminate these disclosures. Thus, greater public firm presence in an industry should reduce uncertainty in that industry. Following the theoretical prediction of investment under uncertainty, we hypothesize and find that private firms are more responsive to their investment opportunities when they operate in industries with greater public firm presence. Further, we find that the effect of public firm presence is greater in industries with better information quality and in industries characterized by a greater degree of investment irreversibility. Our results suggest that public firms generate positive externalities by reducing industry uncertainty and facilitating more efficient private firm investment.

Public Equity and Audit Pricing in the United States

To what degree are audit fees for U.S. firms with publicly traded equity higher than fees for otherwise similar firms with private equity? The answer is potentially important for evaluating regulatory regime design efficiency and for understanding audit demand and production economics. For U.S. firms with publicly traded debt, we hold constant the regulatory regime, including mandated issuer reporting and auditor responsibilities. We vary equity ownership and thus public securities market contextual factors, including any related public firm audit fees from increased audit effort to reduce audit litigation risk and/or pure litigation risk premium (litigation channel effects). In cross‐section, we find that audit fees for public equity firms are 20–22% higher than fees for otherwise similar private equity firms. Time‐series comparisons for firms that change ownership status yield larger percentage fee increases (decreases) for those going public (private). Results are consistent with litigation channel effects giving rise to substantial incremental audit fees for U.S. firms with public equity ownership.

The Market Pricing of Other-Than-Temporary Impairments

____________________________________________________________________________ Abstract: When the fair value of an investment security falls below amortized cost and there is significant doubt that the firm can hold the security until the fair value recovers, managers must recognize an other-than-temporary impairment (OTTI) in net income. Thus, OTTIs represent managers’ attempts to distinguish more certain from less certain losses. We find that the distinctions between more and less certain losses made by commercial bank managers during the financial crisis were informative to investors. Investors were unable to fully anticipate quarterly OTTI charges, and priced OTTIs incrementally to reported fair value gains/losses. We also find that the recent OTTI bifurcation rule isolated a useful component of OTTIs for investors. Our results suggest that investors do not assign the same valuation multiple to all types of unrealized security losses, even though unrealized losses are commonly thought of as transitory items. The results inform recent standard-setting initiatives to expand disclosure about the reasons for changes in fair value.

Private Ownership and the Cost of Public Debt: Evidence from the Bond Market

A number of studies have examined the effect of public and private ownership on the cost of debt and concluded that the cost of debt of privately owned firms is higher, driven mainly by the poorer information environment in which these firms operate. We extend this strand of research in two ways. First, we identify and empirically establish the mechanisms that bring about a higher cost of debt to privately owned firms—namely, the limited access that these firms have to the equity capital market, their high rate of management and private-equity ownership, and their less conservative reporting. Second, we improve the reliability of the estimates of the effect of ownership type on the cost of debt by controlling for the different information environments in which privately and publicly owned firms operate. This is accomplished through the use of a sample consisting of publicly owned and privately owned firms that have public debt and are therefore subject to identical reporting and disclosure requirements. C...

Conforming Tax Avoidance and Capital Market Pressure

In this study we develop a measure of corporate tax avoidance that reduces both financial and taxable income, which we refer to as “book-tax conforming�? tax avoidance. We use simulation analyses, LIFO/FIFO inventory method conversions, and samples of private and public firms, to validate our measure of conforming tax avoidance. We then investigate the prevalence of conforming tax avoidance within a sample of public firms. Results from the validation tests indicate that our measure of conforming tax avoidance successfully captures book-tax conforming transactions and thus, variation in conforming tax avoidance across firms. Consistent with expectations, we also find that the extent to which public firms engage in conforming tax avoidance varies systematically with the capital market pressures to which they are subject. For example, public firms that lack analyst following, do not issue equity securities, report lower sales growth, or smaller discretionary accruals engage in relatively more conforming tax avoidance and less nonconforming tax avoidance. Our study develops a new measure of conforming tax avoidance that should be useful in future research and provides new insights on the extent to which public firms are willing to reduce income tax liabilities at the expense of reporting lower financial income.

Private versus Public Corporate Ownership: Implications for Future Profitability

We investigate the association between public versus private ownership and future long-term changes in profitability. Managers have long debated the implications of public and private corporate ownership; however, little empirical research has provided insight into the issue. We find robust evidence that public firms are associated with significantly lower future long-term changes in operating profitability compared to private firms matched on current profitability, size, growth and industry. We also find that the differential future long-term changes in profitability of public and private firms manifests in both future changes in profit margins and changes in asset turnovers. Additionally, we find evidence consistent with an association between short-termism, competition, and agency costs and the lower future long-term changes in profitability for public versus private firms. The results provide insight for managers and investors into the differential future changes in profitability of public versus private firms and into the factors that drive the differential profitability.

Private Firm Investment and Public Peer Misvaluation

We examine whether misvaluation of publicly traded industry peers is associated with capital expenditures by privately-held firms. An economic competition hypothesis predicts a negative relation because misvaluation-induced new investment by public firms crowds out investment by private firms when they share common input or output markets. An alternative shared-sentiment hypothesis predicts a positive relation because private firm stakeholders share in the sentiment associated with misvaluation in public markets. Misvaluation is proxied using both the price-to-fundamental ratio and an exogenous instrument obtained from mutual fund flows. The evidence is consistent with the shared-sentiment hypothesis, and robust to alternative treatments for growth opportunities. We find expected cross-sectional variation in the strength of the positive relation between public-peer misvaluation and private firm investment. Our results indicate that private firms finance misvaluation-induced investment primarily internally or externally with debt, not equity. Finally, misvaluation-induced investment increases future return on investment for private firms in contrast with public firms. Overall, these findings suggest that overvaluation in public markets increases private firm investments and has beneficial effects on private firm investments by relaxing financing constraints.