德勤-复旦会计论坛系列讲座之一百七十

时 间:2019年11月12日(周二)下午14:00

地 点:史带楼603室

主持人:陈超 教授

演讲者余泳 (University of Texas at Austin)

主 题The effect of managerial litigation risk on earnings warnings: Evidence from a natural experiment

摘 要We examine the causal effect of managerial litigation risk on managers’ disclosure of earnings warnings in the face of large earnings shortfalls. Exploring the staggered adoption of universal demand (UD) laws as an exogenous decrease in litigation risk, we find that the adoption is associated with a decrease in managers’ issuance of earnings warnings, especially among firms facing a higher litigation risk prior to the adoption. In contrast, we find that the adoption is associated with no change in managers’ tendency to alert investors to impending large positive earnings surprises. Further, we find that the adoption is associated with a decrease in the timeliness of overall bad earnings news, but no change in the timeliness of overall good earnings news. Collectively, our results provide causal evidence that higher litigation risk incentivizes managers to issue more earnings warnings. Our results differ from Bourveau et al.’s (2018) finding of an increase in the frequency of management earnings forecasts after the adoption of the UD laws. We reconcile our findings with theirs by demonstrating that the effect of adopting the UD laws on management earnings forecasts depends critically on forecast horizon: The adoption increases long-horizon forecasts, but decreases short-horizon forecasts.

 

会计学系

2019-10-30