SUMMARY: We find that auditor industry expertise is both a firm-level and partner-level phenomenon, which suggests that industry expertise captured by accounting firms is dispersed among engagement partners through knowledge sharing and transfers within audit firms. We also find that the higher audit fees by expert auditors are due to more hours and not higher rates. While spending more hours allows expert auditors to extract higher fees in total, the finding that expert firms/partners exert greater effort does not support the suggestion that expert auditors are in general more efficient in audit production. However, we find weak evidence that audit hours for expert auditors are lower in industries and companies with homogenous operations and comparable accounting than in other industries and companies. This finding suggests that knowledge transfers more likely take place in homogeneous and comparable industries, leading to production efficiency that moderates the increase in audit hours charged by experts. JEL Classifications: M4; M42. Data Availability: All data are available from the identified sources.

The purpose of this study is to apply a combination of sentiment mining techniques and a sustainability balanced scorecard to CEO messages in sustainability management reports to predict corporate financial ratios. We classify the contents of CEO messages into the six perspectives suggested by the sustainability balanced scorecard (SBSC). From the sentiment mining results, we first document that positive words dominate CEO messages in sustainability management reports. Moreover, words related to the sustainability perspective do not generally exhibit a significant relationship with financial ratios. This finding indicates that CEOs’ messages in sustainability management reports seemingly fail to properly represent the firms’ current financial status. Therefore, the results indicate that a stronger supervisory standard may be required to induce CEO disclosures that are more responsible for sustainable management reports.

Few studies examine how firms make strategic decisions over time. In this study, we test whether a firm undertakes corporate social responsibility (CSR) activities as a function of its life-cycle stage. Drawing on prior CSR research that finds ethical concerns and opportunistic behavior to be two key motivations that underpin CSR activities, we hypothesize that firms in their growth stage are positively associated with CSR, while firms in stage of decline are less likely to invest in CSR. The empirical findings of our study—derived by leveraging a sample of South Korean listed firms—are consistent with these predictions. We further find that in the growth stage, group-affiliated firms are more engaged in CSR than are unaffiliated firms. Given that affiliated firms can share the resources of other group-member firms, this evidence supports the slack resource hypothesis. Overall, our results indicate that firms have different CSR strategies, depending on their life-cycle stage.

We explore the association between real earnings management and the persistence of earnings and cash flows, respectively. Further, we investigate the effect of real earnings management on the relation between current stock returns and future earnings. Using 15,826 firm-year observations listed in the Korean stock market from 2000 to 2015, we find that real earnings management is negatively associated with the persistence of earnings. We also find that real earnings management restricts the persistence of cash flows. Lastly, we find that real earnings management prevents the market from assessing firms’ future earnings reflected in the current stock prices.

This study examines how Chief Executive Officer (CEO) overconfidence affects profitability. Using United States data from 1992 to 2010, we find that firms with overconfident CEOs have a greater return on net operating assets (RNOA). To identify the sources of this higher performance, RNOA is partitioned into profit margin and asset turnover. This Dupont analysis reveals that higher RNOA of firms with overconfident CEOs comes from profit margin and is not associated with asset turnover. Our results also show that the earnings components of firms having overconfident CEOs better predict future earnings change. The results are robust to the different definitions of CEO overconfidence and profitability. Additional analyses show that CEO overconfidence is positively related with stock performances proxied by abnormal stock returns. Overall, our results suggest that CEO overconfidence is an important factor that contributes to higher and predictable performance of firms.