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We examine whether firms use social media to strategically disseminate financial information. Analyzing S&P 1500 firms' use of Twitter to disseminate quarterly earnings announcements, we find that firms are less likely to disseminate when the news is bad and when the magnitude of the bad news is worse, consistent with strategic behavior. Furthermore, firms tend to send fewer earnings announcement tweets and “rehash” tweets when the news is bad. Cross-sectional analyses suggest that incentives for strategic dissemination are higher for firms with a lower level of investor sophistication and firms with a larger social media audience. We also find that strategic dissemination behavior is detectable in high litigation risk firms, but not low litigation risk firms. Finally, we find that the tweeting of bad news and the subsequent retweeting of that news by a firm's followers are associated with more negative news articles written about the firm by the traditional media, highlighting a potential downside to Twitter dissemination. JEL Classifications: G14; G38; M10; M21; M41.

Using a new database that contains accounting data for a large sample of U.S. private firms, we provide an investigation of financial reporting quality (FRQ) of U.S. private versus public firms. We find that in general public firms have higher accrual quality and are more conservative. The results are consistent with public firms' reporting reflecting greater demand for financial information. However, these reporting qualities of public firms are mitigated or eliminated in settings where public firms are more likely to manage earnings or face reduced demand for their financial information. Our study contributes not only to the current debate on private versus public financial accounting, but also to the broader literature attempting to understand the determinants of FRQ.

We take advantage of the unique reporting requirements of nonprofit public housing authorities (PHAs) to study the effect of audits on financial information both generally and when there are management incentives to misreport financial data. There is little prior research on the effect of audit adjustments in nonprofit settings and conflicting research on how auditors react to management's incentives to misreport. We identify potential financial statement areas at risk of manipulation based on incentives specific to public housing authorities. Using pre- and post-audit financial data for almost 3,600 PHAs across seven years, we find that auditors make economically and statistically significant adjustments to PHA financial statements. In addition, we find evidence that audits appear to reduce potential management bias, particularly to reduce risks of overstatement. Overall, audits appear to matter in this nonprofit, low-litigation risk setting where there is a large concentration of non-Big 4 auditors.

Charities that use direct mailings or other activities that combine a public education effort with fundraising appeals must allocate the joint costs related to these activities to programs, fundraising, and administration. This study investigates whether charities use joint-cost allocations to manage the program ratio—a widely used measure of spending efficiency. Using a hand-collected dataset of 708 organization-year observations from 1992 to 2000, we find evidence that charities use joint costs to mitigate changes in the program ratio.

Earnings press releases provide managers a forum to present their firm's quarterly financial information and perhaps influence perceptions of the firm's stakeholders. We explore the use of managerial emphasis as a disclosure tool and contribute to the debate over pro forma earnings. We examine (1) the determinants of emphasis placed on pro forma and GAAP earnings within quarterly earnings press releases, (2) whether there has been a shift away from emphasizing pro forma earnings toward GAAP earnings, and (3) whether stock market reactions to earnings news were influenced by emphasis placed on metrics within the press release. We find that firms emphasize metrics that are more value-relevant and portray more favorable firm performance. We also find that the extent of a firm's media coverage affects managers' emphasis decisions. Further, our results indicate a highly significant shift toward GAAP emphasis and away from pro forma emphasis in 2002 relative to 2001. Finally, our stock market tests suggest that greater emphasis on an earnings metric results in a stronger market reaction to the surprise in that metric. Overall, these findings are consistent with managers using emphasis in the earnings press release as a disclosure tool and this emphasis influencing at least one important stakeholder group—investors.

This paper presents an experiment that examines the effect of pro forma earnings disclosures on the judgments of analysts (i.e., more sophisticated investors) and nonprofessional (i.e., less sophisticated) investors. In the experiment, participants developed stock price assessments after reviewing background financial information and a current earnings announcement for a company. The earnings announcement was manipulated to report only GAAP earnings in one condition and both pro forma and GAAP earnings in the other condition. Consistent with empirical evidence, the pro forma earnings in our experiment exceeded GAAP earnings. The results indicate that nonprofessional investors who received an earnings announcement that contained both pro forma and GAAP disclosures assessed a higher stock price than did nonprofessionals who received an announcement containing only GAAP disclosures. Financial analysts' stock price judgments were not affected by the pro forma disclosures. Followup analyses suggest that analysts and nonprofessional investors used different valuation models and information processing. Analysts used well-defined valuation models, based on either earnings-multiples or cash flows, while the nonprofessional investors were more likely to use simpler, heuristic-based valuation models. The pro forma disclosure did not cause nonprofessional investors to assess a higher earnings number for determining a stock price, but rather caused nonprofessionals to perceive the earnings announcement as more favorable, which in turn caused them to convert earnings or some other performance metric into a higher stock price. This effect appears to be due to unintentional cognitive effects, rather than nonprofessionals relying on pro forma earnings information because they perceived it to be informative.

On October 23, 2000, the SEC implemented Regulation FD (Fair Disclosure), which prohibits firms from privately disclosing value-relevant information to select securities markets professionals without simultaneously disclosing the same information to the public. We examine whether Regulation FD's prohibition of selective disclosure impairs the flow of financial information to the capital markets prior to earnings announcements. After implementation of FD, we find (1) improved informational efficiency of stock prices prior to earnings announcements, as evidenced by smaller deviations between pre-and post-announcement stock prices; (2) no reliable evidence of change in analysts' earnings forecast errors or dispersion; and (3) a substantial increase in the volume of firms' voluntary, forward-looking, earnings-related disclosures. Overall, we find no evidence Regulation FD impaired the information available to investors prior to earnings announcements, and some of our evidence is consistent with improvement.