Clare Wang

Accounting Standards Harmonization and Financial Statement Comparability: Evidence from Transnational Information Transfer

This paper investigates whether accounting standards harmonization enhances the comparability of financial information across countries. I hypothesize that a firm yet to announce earnings reacts more strongly to the earnings announcement of a foreign firm when both report under the same rather than different accounting standards. My analysis of abnormal price reactions for a global sample of firms supports the prediction. Next, in an attempt to control for the underlying economic comparability and the effects of changes in reporting quality, I use a difference-in-differences design around the mandatory introduction of International Financial Reporting Standards. I find that mandatory adopters experience a significant increase in market reactions to the release of earnings by voluntary adopters compared to the period preceding mandatory adoption. This increase is not observed for nonadopters. Taken together, the results show that accounting standards harmonization facilitates transnational information transfer and suggest financial statement comparability as a direct mechanism.

Dividend Payouts and Information Shocks

We examine changes in firms’ dividend payouts following an exogenous shock to the information asymmetry problem between managers and investors. Agency theories predict a decrease in dividend payments to the extent that improved public information lowers managers’ need to convey their commitment to avoid overinvestment via costly dividend payouts. Conversely, dividends could increase if minority investors are in a better position to extract cash dividends. We test these predictions by analyzing the dividend payment behavior of a global sample of firms around the mandatory adoption of IFRS and the initial enforcement of new insider trading laws. Both events serve as proxies for a general improvement of the information environment and, hence, the corporate governance structure in the economy. We find that, following the two events, firms are less likely to pay (increase) dividends, but more likely to cut (stop) such payments. The changes occur around the time of the informational shock, and only in countries and for firms subject to the regulatory change. They are more pronounced when the inherent agency issues or the informational shocks are stronger. We further find that the information content of dividends decreases after the events. The results highlight the importance of the agency costs of free cash flows (and changes therein) for shaping firms’ payout policies.

Making Sense of One Dollar CEO Salaries

We examine the determinants and outcomes of Chief Executive Officers (CEOs) accepting a

Corporate Scandals and Regulation

1 salary, a compensation practice that occurs relatively frequently in high-profile firms and is debated by regulators, investors, and the media. Using a hand-collected sample of 93 CEOs from 91 firms between 1993 and 2011, we examine the triggers preceding the

Private Litigation Costs and Voluntary Disclosure: Evidence from the Morrison Ruling

1 salary decision, the factors associated with the decision, subsequent stock returns, and the outcomes for the CEOs. Our evidence is consistent with two explanations for the phenomenon: 1) it is a gesture of sacrifice by CEOs of firms in crisis, and 2) it is a signal of better future performance by CEOs of growing firms. Our analyses highlight the two different circumstances and shed light on an interesting debate that has thus far been supported only by anecdotal evidence.

The Impact of Currency Risk on US MNCs: New Evidence From Returns and Cross-Border Investment Around Currency Crises

Are regulatory interventions delayed reactions to market failures or can regulators proactively pre-empt corporate misbehavior? From a public interest view, we would expect “effective” regulation to ex ante mitigate agency conflicts between corporate insiders and outsiders, and prevent corporate misbehavior from occurring or quickly rectify transgressions. However, regulators are also self-interested and may be captured, uninformed, or ideological, and become less effective as a result. In this registered report, we develop a historical time series of corporate (accounting) scandals and (accounting) regulations for a panel of 26 countries from 1800 to 2015. An analysis of the lead-lag relations at both the global and individual country level yields the following insights: (i) Corporate scandals are an antecedent to regulation over long stretches of time, suggesting that regulators are typically less flexible and informed than firms. (ii) Regulation is positively related to the incidence of future scandals, suggesting that regulators are not fully effective, that explicit rules are required to identify scandalous corporate actions, or that new regulations have unintended consequences. (iii) There exist systematic differences in these ∗ The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania ∗∗ London Business School ∗∗∗ Tippie College of Business, University of Iowa

Signaling Through Corporate Accountability Reporting

We use a natural experiment, the Supreme Court Ruling in Morrison v. National Australia Bank and the subsequent Dodd-Frank Act, to examine whether and how expected private litigation costs affect voluntary disclosure behavior. The Morrison decision applied a presumption against extraterritoriality for all securities actions. Congress quickly responded by exempting SEC actions through the Dodd-Frank Act, with the result that Morrison eliminates only private securities actions for shares purchased on non-US exchanges. These events lowered the expected private litigation costs for foreign firms cross-listed on US exchanges. We find a deterioration in our proxies for voluntary disclosure for these firms relative to a matched sample of US firms. The effects we document are stronger for firms with weaker home country institutions and for firms that experienced a larger decline in expected private litigation costs following Morrison. The evidence is consistent with firms responding to a reduction in expected private litigation costs by reducing voluntary disclosure.

Do Firms Strategically Disseminate? Evidence from Corporate Use of Social Media

The Impact of Currency Risk on US MNCs: New Evidence From Returns and Cross-Border Investment Around Currency Crises