Discretionary accruals reflect the management’s accounting choices made within the flexibility of accounting standards. Discretionary accruals can be used by the management to better reflect the economic value of the firm and to signal their private information about a firm’s future prospects to the market, but they can also be used opportunistically by managers. However, the prior literature documents mixed evidence related to the information content in discretionary accruals. Thus, we examine the association between discretionary accruals and analysts’ forecast dispersion to provide further evidence on the information content in discretionary accruals. Moreover, as greater external monitoring and rigorous ESG management allow less room for manager’s manipulation of discretionary accruals, we investigate whether greater external monitoring by institutional owners and higher ESG scores moderate the relationship between discretionary accruals and analysts’ disagreements on long-term EPS growth forecasts. We find a positive association between discretionary accruals and analysts’ forecast dispersion, which suggests there is low information content in discretionary accruals. Furthermore, we find that a greater concentration in institutional ownership, greater blockholders’ institutional ownership, and a positive ESG score mitigate the positive relationship between discretionary accruals and analysts’ forecast dispersion. Thus, better external monitoring and higher quality ESG enhance the information credibility of a firm’s disclosure.

Consumers have an aversion to purchasing near-expiry food products, which leads to enormous food waste and economic loss. Given the importance of this issue, past research has studied the effect of impending expiration date on product sales, but its focus has been limited to perishable food products. Since the expiration dates of non-perishable food products are treated as less important than those of perishable food products, we expect that the resulting effect on sales largely varies by shopping environment. With the growing importance of online shopping in food sales, we examine how the effect of impending expiration date differs between mobile and PC shopping environments. By analyzing a unique data set from an online salvage store, we find that consumer aversion toward near-expiry products is more salient in the PC shopping environment than in the mobile shopping environment. However, when there is a deeper price promotion, the between-channel difference is reduced as the sensitivity of an impending expiration date on sales increases in the mobile shopping environment. These findings not only represent novel contributions to the literature but also provide managerial implications for practitioners.

The study of the potential relationships between employee turnover and organizational performance has been important for researchers, practitioners and audit regulators. However, limited evidence exists regarding the association between staff turnover and organizational performance in professional accounting firms. The present study aims to fill this gap in the literature by using a unique hand‐collected dataset from Korea. We find that the collective turnover rate of professional staff is negatively associated with public accounting firms' profitability and productivity. When considering the turnover rates of partners and senior certified public accountants (CPAs) separately, we observe that although both partner and senior CPA turnover are negatively associated with profitability and productivity, partner turnover is more strongly associated with these outcomes. Additionally, we find that audit partner turnover is associated with an increase in the percentage of auditing enforcements and a decrease in the audit client retention rate, which may reflect challenges in maintaining audit quality and audit client relations at the accounting firm level. We further find that the negative associations of professional staff turnover with profitability and productivity are less pronounced for Big 4 accounting firms, but the negative association with audit client retention is more pronounced for these firms. Overall, the results suggest that, although turnover is negatively associated with the organization‐level outcomes of public accounting firms, the turnover–performance relationship depends on moderators such as job level and organization size.