James R. Doty was the chair of the US Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (PCAOB) from February 2011 to January 2018. Extant research investigates the outcomes of the PCAOB's regulatory approach without examining what that approach is. This article examines two approaches to regulation: merit and disclosure. For example, the PCAOB inspection process, which focuses on remediation of deficiencies, is a form of merit regulation. A disclosure approach to regulation would focus instead on more timely disclosure of inspection findings to audit committees, investors, and other users of financial statements. The article explores the impact of Doty's regulatory approach on the direction of the PCAOB during his tenure. Under Doty, the PCAOB's approach shifted towards a more disclosure based regulatory approach and away from a merit based regulatory approach. The article is based on extensive documentary evidence as well as interviews with James Doty.

We conduct a comparison of three portfolio investment strategies in the US stock market following the implementation of Regulation Fair Disclosure in October 2000. The strategies analyzed are analyst-recommended, recommendation changes, and momentum portfolios. Across various time periods, company sizes, and industry sectors, the momentum portfolio consistently outperforms the other strategies. Portfolios based on analyst recommendations exhibit poor performance in industries such as consumer staples and materials, which are strongly correlated with oil prices. These industries are susceptible to external demand and supply-side price shocks that are not adequately captured by analyst recommendations. The findings highlight firstly, the efficacy of the momentum strategy and the limitations of relying solely on analysts’ recommendations, particularly in oil-dependent sectors; and secondly, the varying dynamics and performance of different investment strategies for investors seeking to optimize their investment decisions across different sectors and market conditions.

Using a sample of Chinese listed firms for the period 2009 to 2018, we analyze the relationship between the financialization of non-financial corporations (NFCs) and corporate performance from both long-term and short-term perspectives. Our results show that the impact of financialization on firm performance is not simply a crowding-out or pulling effect but rather depends on the type of financial assets held by the firms. The holdings of investment financial assets generally have a pulling effect on both the short-term performance and market expectations of a firm's future profits as proxied by Tobin's Q, but they crowd out the innovation activities that are critical to long-term performance. Although monetary financial assets positively affect corporate profitability, they inhibit the increase of return on invested capital and long-term performance. Additionally, compared with monetary financial assets, investment financial assets play a more important role in promoting short-term performance, although the crowding-out effect on innovation activities is more prominent for investment financial assets. Furthermore, this paper also concludes that compared with manufacturing and non-state-owned enterprises (NSOEs), the role of financialization in promoting the performance of non-manufacturing and state-owned enterprises (SOEs) is more significant.

While the role of lobbying in the US public accounting profession has been the subject of several studies, what has not been addressed is the profession's historic reluctance to lobby and the impact this may have had on the profession. This paper provides a case study of public accounting's interaction with government and the need for the profession to articulate the impact of government policies on the practice of accounting. It reviews and assesses the antitrust investigations by the US Justice Department and Federal Trade Commission that led to the repeal of the profession's anticompetitive ethics rules, rules that had governed American public accounting for most of the 20th century. These investigations are often blamed for an increased competitive atmosphere in public accounting that prioritized growth and profitability over quality in attest services. Using records obtained from Freedom of Information Act requests and archival sources, I attempt to reconstruct the US Government's motivations and the efforts of the American Institute of CPAs. I find a troubling lack of understanding of the audit profession by executive branch regulators and Congress and a reticence by the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants to advocate for the profession that led to what many observers see as a profound misapplication of the antitrust laws. While this study deals only with the US, similar regulatory changes took place in Canada, the UK, Australia, and New Zealand.

We apply game theory to model how alternative mandatory audit firm rotation regimes can affect the strategic interaction between auditee and auditor firms, and analyze potential consequences on detection risk and impairment of auditor scepticism. The major results suggest that: (1) relative to an initial state with no rotation requirement but high probability for impaired auditor scepticism, imposing either short-term or long-term mandatory audit firm rotation will remove the threat to auditor scepticism and lead to higher audit fees and lower detection risk; (2) relative to long-term mandatory audit firm rotation, imposing a short-term rotation will lead to lower audit fees and higher detection risk, resulting from greater informational frictions. We further find that imposing supplementary regulatory instruments, such as increased regulatory scrutiny of the auditee and/or auditor, can be used to lower the detection risk and increase audit quality. We discuss implications of these findings for empirical research.

We provide a comprehensive and more consistent approach to analyse and compare the risk-return relationships of Australian superannuation investment options for the period January 1990 to December 2016. In estimating the risk profiles of the investment options, we allow for the movement of the asset classes over time by employing a varying coefficient panel estimation technique. We find that while risk increases across different investment options from moderate to aggressive options, using different percentages of identifying a balanced fund does not impact the long-term risk measurement. We equally find that the risk-return relationships of investment options are not sensitive to the modelling framework, except for the crisis analysis, in which the Fama-French five-factor model provides greater sensitivity.

Firms in transition economies often suffer financial constraints. In initial public offerings (IPOs), however, many newly listed Chinese firms raise funds in excess of what is originally planned. This paper examines whether these excess IPO funds are wasted on value-destroying spending or enable firms to take growth opportunities. After controlling for the endogeneity issue, we find that Chinese firms with excess IPO funds have better post-IPO operating performance, especially those with limited financing channels. In revealing the mechanism, we find that excess IPO fundraising alleviates financial constraints and reduces the cost of debt.

Using a sample of up to 2,503 initial public offerings (IPOs) in 32 countries from 2011–2017, we predict and find that higher levels of country-level accounting enforcement are associated with lower levels of IPO underpricing. IPOs in countries with a relatively low accounting enforcement score (second quintile) exhibit a mean underpricing of 19%, whereas the mean underpricing amounts to just 9% in countries with a relatively high score (fourth quintile). The results remain qualitatively the same when we employ a multi-level model or a difference-in-difference design. In countries that substantially strengthened their accounting enforcement in the 2003–2009 period, the level of IPO underpricing decreased significantly. We show that accounting enforcement matters for the cost of going public.