Contributions published at Financial Accounting (David Oesch)

We investigate how luck, namely, changes in a firm's performance beyond the CEO's control, affects strategic risk-taking. Fusing upper echelons theory with insights from psychology and behavioral strategy research, we hypothesize that there is a positive association between luck and strategic risk-taking and that this effect is stronger for bad luck than for good luck. We further argue that these effects vary depending on whether CEOs have experienced negative events earlier in their professional careers. Measuring luck as the exogenous component of recent firm performance, we show empirically that CEOs react to bad luck by adopting more conservative risk-taking policies while showing no reactions to good luck. This effect predictably varies with the strength of bad luck signals, and it is stronger for CEOs who have experienced negative events during their professional careers. We contribute to the literature by providing the first evidence on the role of luck in corporate strategic risk-taking.

This paper documents that managers of multinational companies adjust voluntary disclosure after significant events at international subsidiaries. We show an increase in the likelihood and frequency of management forecasts following natural disasters in regions where companies operate subsidiaries. The exogenous and staggered nature of natural disasters as well as our research design choices substantially raise the hurdle for alternative explanations of our result. Further analyses suggest that the effect is particularly strong for companies that rely on equity financing. Our paper contributes to the nascent literature on transmission effects within international business groups.

We examine the relation between disclosure quality and information asymmetry among market participants following an exogenous shock to macroeconomic risk. In 2015 the Swiss National Bank abruptly announced that it would abandon the longstanding minimum euro-Swiss franc exchange rate. We find evidence suggesting that firms with more transparent disclosures regarding their foreign exchange risk exposure ex ante exhibit significantly lower information asymmetry ex post. The information gap in bid-ask spreads appears within 30 minutes of the announcement and persists for two weeks, during which new information gradually substitutes for past disclosures. We validate the information dynamics of past risk disclosures with three field surveys: (1) Sell-side analysts emphasize the importance of existing (risk) disclosures in evaluating the translational and transactional effects of the currency shock. (2) Lending banks’ credit officers rely on past disclosures as the primary information source available for smaller (unlisted) firms in the immediate aftermath of the shock. (3) Investor-relations managers use existing financial filings as a key resource when communicating with external stakeholders. The results suggest that historical disclosures help investors attenuate information asymmetry in light of unexpected news.

In diesem Jahrbuch analysieren hochkarätige und erfahrene Experten aktuelle Herausforderungen und Entwicklungen im Finanz- und Rechnungswesen; zudem werden Strategien und Wege zu deren Lösung aufgezeigt.

We investigate the causal effect of intangible capital on leverage. To address endogeneity, we exploit patent invalidations by the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, where judges are randomly assigned to cases. Differences in judge leniency provide exogenous variation in the probability that firms’ patents are invalidated. Using this probability as an instrument for exogenous losses in intangible capital, we find a patent invalidation leads to a 14.1% reduction in leverage, suggesting that intangible capital causally supports leverage. This local average treatment effect is stronger in firms who use patents as loan collateral, in less creditworthy and in smaller firms. The deleveraging after patent invalidation is mainly driven by firms reducing short-term debt.

Does the impact of international Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (PCAOB) inspections extend beyond country borders of inspected auditors? We investigate this question by examining multinational business groups. Following initial PCAOB inspections of accounting firms auditing foreign U.S.-listed global ultimate owners, our findings indicate that their international subsidiaries decrease earnings management. Research design choices such as the comparison of treated observations with same country-industry-year control observations and a fixed effects structure that controls for country, industry, year, and group characteristics mitigate concerns of omitted variables. Our paper provides evidence for benefits of international PCAOB inspections over and above the previously documented effects for firms located in the countries of the inspected auditors.

Zur bilanziellen Behandlung von Kryptowährungen nach den Rechnungslegungsvorschriften für Banken besteht derzeit noch keine Literatur. Der vorliegende Beitrag liefert eine für die Anwendung der bestehenden Vorschriften notwendige Sachverhaltsdifferenzierung und teleologische Auslegung.

In diesem Jahrbuch analysieren hochkarätige und erfahrene Experten aktuelle Herausforderungen und Entwicklungen im Finanz- und Rechnungswesen; zudem werden Strategien und Wege zu deren Lösung aufgezeigt. Die Herausgeber Prof. Dr. Reto Eberle, Prof. Dr. David Oesch und Prof. Dr. Dieter Pfaff vom Institut für Betriebswirtschaftslehre der Universität Zürich sowie ihr namhaftes Autorenteam aus Wissenschaft und Praxis versorgen Sie wieder mit topaktuellen, praxisorientierten Themen rund um das Finanz- und Rechnungswesen in der Schweiz.

We examine the determinants and consequences of voting outcomes in uncontested director elections. Exploiting a unique hand-collected data set of the rationale behind proxy advisors’ recommendations - the primary driver of voting outcomes—we document the director and board characteristics on which voting shareholders focus (as well as those that they neglect), their evolution over time, and their relative importance. Absent a negative recommendation, high votes withheld are infrequent, highlighting the agenda-setting role of proxy advisors. While high votes withheld rarely result in director turnover, our analyses show that firms often respond to an adverse vote by explicitly addressing the underlying concern. Overall, it appears that shareholders use their votes in uncontested director elections to get directors to address specific problems, rather than to vote them onto or off of the board, but they do so only on matters highlighted by the proxy advisors.

We analyze the valuation effect of board industry experience and channels through which industry experience of outside directors relates to firm value. Our analysis shows that firms with more experienced outside directors are valued at a premium compared to firms with less experienced outside directors. Additional analyses, including a quasi-experimental setting based on director deaths, mitigate endogeneity concerns. The association between having directors with more industry experience and higher firm value is more pronounced for firms with larger investment programs, larger cash reserves, and during crises. In contrast, it is weaker in more dynamic industries, i.e., industries that rank high in terms of sales growth, R&D expenditures, merger activities, competitive threat, and product market changes, where the value of previously acquired experience is likely to be diminished. Overall, our findings are consistent with board industry experience being a valuable corporate governance mechanism.

We investigate whether investor reactions to the announcement of a new outside director appointment significantly depend upon the director's experience in the appointing firm's industry. Our sample includes 688 outside director appointments to boards of S&P 500 companies from 2005 to 2010. We find significantly higher announcement returns upon appointments of experienced versus inexperienced directors. To alleviate endogeneity concerns, we use the deaths of 200 directors holding 280 outside directorships as an identification strategy and find significantly more negative announcement returns associated with the deaths of experienced versus inexperienced directors. However, while our results are robust to accounting for time-fixed unobservable director and firm characteristics, we still cannot completely rule out endogenous firm-director matching driving our results.