I examine the impact of the presence and characteristics of equity analysts' cash flow forecasts on cost of debt. I find the presence of cash flow forecasts is associated with a lower cost of debt relative to firm-years with only earnings estimates or neither estimate. I also find cash flow forecast characteristics are associated with cost of debt after controlling for other known determinants of yield spreads. Additional analyses decomposing earnings forecast characteristics into cash flow and accruals components find the cash flow component is associated with cost of debt, but the accruals component is not. Overall, the results indicate that debt market participants find cash flow forecasts useful in reducing information asymmetry and/or providing monitoring, as well as being useful in providing information regarding expected default risk in determining expected returns.

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This dissertation examines the persistence and value relevance of earnings attributable to tax savings and the extent to which this persistence and value relevance differs from those of nontax earnings. After controlling for factors previously shown to be systematically associated with the tax component of earnings, results show that tax savings are significant and statistically persistent but statistically less persistent than earnings from nontax sources. Results also reveal that the persistence of tax savings changes across tax regimes whereas earnings from nontax sources remain relatively unchanged. Contextual analysis shows that (1) the persistence of tax savings is largely driven by firms in the pharmaceutical, oil and gas, financial services, insurance and real estate industries, (2) the persistence of tax savings is increasing in the R&D tax credit and (3) this persistence is increasing in settings where the ratio of foreign over domestic earnings is increasing. Additionally, the persistence and value relevance of tax savings is increasing for positive tax savings, implying a market reward (penalty) for lower (higher) tax savings (reported effective tax rates). When I compare the results from my valuation tests with those from my persistence tests, I find that tax savings are sometimes not persistent but value relevant and sometimes persistent but not value relevant whereas the persistence and value relevance of nontax earnings are always consistent. These findings are consistent with managerial opportunistic behavior, a market that suspects managerial opportunistic behavior or a stock market that does not understand fully the persistence of tax savings relative to nontax savings. Results from the Mishkin (1983) test show that the market appears to significantly overestimate both the persistence of tax savings and nontax earnings, implying that securities are mispriced. This potential mispricing appears to be more severe for tax savings, implying that, on average, the market does not appear to understand fully the persistence and value relevance of the tax component of earnings. Finally, this study reconciles some of the mixed results of prior research and carries significant implications for policy makers, firm management, market participants and accounting researchers.

Prior literature suggests that a focus on employee and customer relations alone improves financial performance. However, I find that a focus on employee and customer relations alone is not related to higher earnings persistence, but rather I hypothesize and find that the alignment of employee and customer relations with competitive strategy is related to higher earnings persistence. I further explore this relation by examining the contextual environment in which the firm operates. I consider the moderating variables of firm size, leverage, growth, and corporate governance and find that alignment impacts the persistence of earnings for leverage and governance but not for firm size or growth. I then examine the relation between a firms alignment and the markets reaction to the firms reported earnings. The analysis suggests that alignment is critical for cost leaders but is relatively less important for differentiators. Taken as a whole the findings suggest that firm alignment plays a role in earnings quality and is useful to investors in their interpretation of earnings.

The GAO has recently expressed concern that audit market concentration (i.e., not client concentration) could result in greater audit fees and lower audit quality. However, the extant literature finds that local audit markets with higher concentration have lower audit fees (Numan and Willekens 2012) and fewer accounting restatements (Newton et al. 2013). In this study, I show that the effect of audit market concentration on the level of audit fees depends on the size of the audit market (i.e., the size and/or number of clients in the local geographic area). When the audit market contains fewer clients and/or those clients are small in size, audit fees are increasing in audit market concentration. Conversely, in markets where there are a large number of clients and/or the clients are large in size, audit market concentration leads to lower audit fees. In additional tests, I examine whether the relationship between audit market concentration and audit quality also depends on the size of the audit market. The evidence suggests that audit quality is higher in markets where both audit market concentration and audit market size are high.

Currently, the Big Four accounting firms – PwC, EY, Deloitte, and KPMG – dominate the audit oligopoly. Many have raised the question: “Are the Big Four too big or too few to fail?” This paper looks at the history leading up to the establishment of the Big Four, cases since the fall of Arthur Andersen, and empirical evidence on the probability of a Big Four failure to conclude that it is not likely for a Big Four to fail under current circumstances. However, if the Big Four are truly too few to fail, it raises problems of moral hazard in the industry. This paper explores the inclination of the Big Four towards moral hazard by examining the reasons auditors might be less inclined to act in the best interest of financial statement users. In exploring solutions, this paper finds that the best way to ensure auditor’s act in the interest of public investors is to align their financial incentives with independent third parties rather than management or board members.

I investigate the effects of the issuance of the PCAOB Part II report on audit fees and audit quality. The PCAOB replaced the peer review auditor program with an independent inspection of audit firms. Upon completion of each inspection, the PCAOB issues inspection reports that include a public portion (Part I) of identified audit deficiencies, and most include a nonpublic portion (Part II) of identified quality control weaknesses which is not disclosed publicly unless the audit firm does not sufficiently complete remediation during the next 12 months. Upon issuance of the Part II report, I find that audit firms experience reputational damage resulting in a decrease in audit fees. I also find that though audit fees decrease, audit quality increases as the audit firms increase their efforts to remediate the quality control issues identified in the Part II report in an effort to comply with the expectations of the PCAOB. In summary, my results indicate that there is an associated cost to audit firms when they are unable to remediate their control deficiencies within the 12 month remediation period as well as an associated benefit for the audit clients who decide to remain with the audit firm after the issuance of the Part II report, as they not only are able to negotiate lower audit fees but also receive higher audit quality for those lower fees.

<p> This study examined the impact of fiscal decentralization on quality financial reporting at the local government level in Ghana. The study is important because it provides development partners with the assurance that Metropolitan, Municipal, and District Assemblies (MMDAs) funds are used for their intended purposes. The study was based on the theory of local public expenditures, which posits that fiscal decentralization may enhance local capacities for service delivery. The key research question examined the extent to which fiscal decentralization has influenced quality financial reporting at the local level. The research design was quantitative, randomly sampling stakeholders in the local government structures including traditional rulers, assembly members, principal spending officers, budget officers, auditors, and accountants (<i>n</i> = 65). Descriptive plots, Pearson chi-square, and multiple regression analysis were used to examine the relationship between the dependent variable of quality financial reporting and the independent variables of expenditure responsibilities, taxation powers, intergovernmental fiscal transfers, and borrowing powers. The results of the analysis revealed taxation powers to be the most significant contributor to quality financial reporting. Quality financial reporting improved internally-generated resources, reduced audit queries, and served as a basis for granting funds to MMDAs. The study recommends that MMDAs be given taxation powers to enable local assemblies to generate more revenue so as to minimize the need for the transfer of funds from development partners and central government. The significant social change implication of this study lies in giving MMDAs control of service delivery at the local level.</p>

A large body of literature examines the determinants of corporate tax avoidance. In this paper I examine a new determinant of tax avoidance: innovation. Firms with more innovation generate more patents. Due to information asymmetry between the managers of the firm and tax authorities, firms have considerable discretion in choosing which country the patent revenue is generated in. In this study, I predict that firms with more patents will choose to attribute the revenue from those patents to countries with low tax rates. Using a relatively new data source which contains data on patents, I find evidence consistent with my predictions. Specifically, I find that patent activity is negatively associated with firms tax rates. The results are robust to different measures of effective tax rates and to propensity-score matching.

Over the past several decades, accounting standard setters have been gradually shifting financial reporting toward an asset/liability view, by rewriting the underlying conceptual framework and issuing accounting standards that reflect this view. The asset/liability view enhances comparability of a firms investment base to that of its peers, and thus enhances the comparability of a firms return of equity (ROE). This, in turn, increases the transparency with which firm-specific performance differs from its peers. Greater transparency would be expected to improve predictive usefulness, but would also place greater pressure on a firm to meet the performance of its peers. In the US, I find that predictive usefulness has generally increased with the shift, indicating that rather than resulting in greater earnings management designed to mask firm-specific differences, the shift resulted in greater transparency of firm-specific accounting information. I also find predictive usefulness has increased in countries that have adopted IFRS, indicating that a further shift toward an asset/liability view to include the greater use of fair values common in IFRS further increased transparency of firm-specific accounting information in adopting countries. This suggests that expanding the use of fair values and/or adopting IFRS in the US may also result in greater reporting transparency. But as the predictive usefulness increases, I find that analysts in the US are not increasing their reliance on firm-specific accounting information, suggesting analysts remain skeptical, even though analysts would likely increase the efficiency in which they form their forecasts by relying more on accounting information.