Liandong Zhang

Accounting Conservatism and Stock Price Crash Risk: Firm-Level Evidence

Using a large sample of U.S. firms during 1964–2007, we find that conditional conservatism is associated with a lower likelihood of a firms future stock price crashes. This finding holds for multiple measures of conditional conservatism and crash risk and is robust to controlling for other known determinants of crash risk and firm-fixed effects. Moreover, we find that the relation between conservatism and crash risk is more pronounced for firms with higher information asymmetry. Overall, our results are consistent with the notion that conditional conservatism limits managers’ incentive and ability to overstate performance and hide bad news from investors, which, in turn, reduces stock price crash risk.

Short Selling Pressure, Stock Price Behavior, and Management Forecast Precision: Evidence from a Natural Experiment

Using a natural experiment (Regulation SHO), we show that short selling pressure and consequent stock price behavior have a causal effect on managers’ voluntary disclosure choices. Specifically, we find that managers respond to a positive exogenous shock to short selling pressure and price sensitivity to bad news by reducing the precision of bad news forecasts. This finding on management forecasts appears to be generalizable to other corporate disclosures. In particular, we find that, in response to increased short selling pressure, managers also reduce the readability (or increase the fuzziness) of bad news annual reports. Overall, our results suggest that maintaining the current level of stock prices is an important consideration in managers’ strategic disclosure decisions.

Financial Reporting Opacity and Expected Crash Risk: Evidence from Implied Volatility Smirks

The recent financial crisis has stimulated a renewed interest in understanding the determinants of stock price crash risk (i.e., left tail risk). Recent research shows that opaque financial reports enable managers to hide and accumulate bad news for extended periods. When the accumulated bad news reaches a certain tipping point, it will be suddenly released to the market at once, resulting in an abrupt decline in stock price (i.e., a crash). This study extends this line of research by examining the impact of financial reporting opacity on perceived or expected crash risk. Prominent economists, such as Olivier Blanchard, argue that removing the perception of tail risks (in addition to realized tail risks) is crucial in restoring investor confidence and stabilizing the stock market. Using the steepness of option implied volatility skew as a proxy for perceived crash risk, we find that accrual management, the presence of financial statement restatements, and auditor-attested internal control weakness are all positively and significantly associated with the level of perceived crash risk. Our results suggest that improving financial reporting transparency is an important mechanism for firms and policymakers to reduce the perception of tail risks and stabilize the stock market.

CEO Overconfidence and Stock Price Crash Risk

This study examines the association between chief executive officer (CEO) overconfidence and future stock price crash risk. Overconfident managers overestimate the returns to their investment projects and misperceive negative net present value (NPV) projects as value creating. They also tend to ignore or explain away privately observed negative feedback. As a result, negative NPV projects are kept for too long and their bad performance accumulates, which can lead to stock price crashes. Using a large sample of firms for the period 1993–2010, we find that firms with overconfident CEOs have higher stock price crash risk than firms with nonoverconfident CEOs. The impact of managerial overconfidence on crash risk is more pronounced when the CEO is more dominant in the top management team and when there are greater differences of opinion among investors. Finally, it appears that the effect of CEO overconfidence on crash risk is less pronounced for firms with more conservative accounting policies.

Trade Secrets Law and Corporate Disclosure: Causal Evidence on the Proprietary Cost Hypothesis

This study exploits the staggered adoption of the inevitable disclosure doctrine (IDD) by U.S. state courts as an exogenous shock that generates variations in the proprietary costs of disclosure. We find that firms respond to IDD adoption by reducing the level of disclosure regarding their customers’ identities, supporting the proprietary cost hypothesis. Our results are stronger for firms in industries with a higher degree of entry threats, for firms in more volatile industries, and for firms with a lower degree of external financing dependence. Overall, this study represents one of the first efforts in identifying the causal effect of proprietary costs of disclosure on the supply of disclosure.

Readability of 10-K Reports and Stock Price Crash Risk

This paper shows that less readable 10-K reports predict higher stock price crash risk. Using stock price crash risk or, more generally, the third moment of stock return distribution as a powerful indicator of managerial bad news hoarding, our results strongly support the prediction that managers can successfully hide adverse information and boost current stock prices by writing more complex financial reports. Additional analyses show that the effect of financial reporting complexity on crash risk is more pronounced for firms with (persistent) negative earnings news or with transitory positive earnings news, for firms with greater CEO stock option incentive, and for firms with lower litigation risk. We also find that the passage of the Sarbanes–Oxley Act (SOX) does not mitigate the relation between financial reporting complexity and crash risk. Moreover, it appears that textual obfuscation is more significant than earnings management in determining crash risk in the post-SOX era. Finally, firms with less readable financial reports experience sharper price drops during the 2007–2008 financial crisis.

Tax Planning Diffusion along the Supply Chain

We investigate the diffusion of tax planning across firms, and the real effects and sharing of benefits from such diffusion. Using supply chain relationships among firms as a possible diffusion channel, we find that tax planning spreads from principal customers to their dependent suppliers. We find that tax planning diffusion has real effects on product markets and that both parties to the tax planning diffusion share in the benefits. As tax planning diffuses to suppliers, suppliers share the tax savings with their customers by reducing the mark-up on their products. Finally, we show that tax planning diffusion is more pronounced when the customer and the supplier share a common external auditor and when they are located in the same state, suggesting that these diffusion channels complement one another.

Credit Default Swaps and Borrower Tax Avoidance

This study investigates the effect of the debtor–creditor relationship on firms’ tax planning decisions. We explore the initiation of credit default swaps (CDS) as a shock to the debtor–creditor relationship that attenuates the concavity of creditors’ payoff function and reduces their incentives to closely monitor debtors and to protect their claims. As a result, debtors engage in more tax avoidance. Less price protection by creditors also reduces debtors’ marginal cost of tax avoidance and thus increases debtors’ level of tax avoidance. Using a differences-in-differences regression, we find that borrowing firms significantly increase their level of tax avoidance when there are CDS trading on their debts. This effect is more pronounced when the debtor–creditor relationship is characterized by continuous monitoring prior to CDS trade initiation, when creditors suffer lower reputation losses if they reduce monitoring post-CDS, and when the CDS market is more liquid.