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A number of studies have examined the effect of public and private ownership on the cost of debt and concluded that the cost of debt of privately owned firms is higher, driven mainly by the poorer information environment in which these firms operate. We extend this strand of research in two ways. First, we identify and empirically establish the mechanisms that bring about a higher cost of debt to privately owned firms—namely, the limited access that these firms have to the equity capital market, their high rate of management and private-equity ownership, and their less conservative reporting. Second, we improve the reliability of the estimates of the effect of ownership type on the cost of debt by controlling for the different information environments in which privately and publicly owned firms operate. This is accomplished through the use of a sample consisting of publicly owned and privately owned firms that have public debt and are therefore subject to identical reporting and disclosure requirements. Certain data and design features allow us to better control for other factors that might lead to the observed difference in the cost of debt between the two groups of firms. The results contribute to our understanding of the role of ownership type on the cost of capital. This paper was accepted by Suraj Srinivasan, accounting.

The paper examines the power and reliability of the differential timeliness (DT) measure developed by Basu (1997) to gauge reporting conservatism. We identify certain characteristics of the information environment unrelated to conservatism that affect the DT measure and find that it is sensitive to the degree of uniformity in the content of the news during the examined period, the types of events occurring in the period, and firms' disclosure policies. Our tests, based on both actual and simulated data, indicate that assessing the extent of reporting conservatism using this measure requires the recognition of, and control for, these characteristics. We also find that the difference in the timeliness of reporting bad versus good news is likely to be more pronounced than previously reported. Further, we provide additional evidence on the negative association between the DT measure and alternative aspects of conservatism, suggesting that the exclusive reliance on any single measure to assess the overall conservatism of a reporting regime (firms, countries, or time periods) is likely to lead to incorrect inferences.

A number of studies have examined the change over time in the information content of accounting numbers to stockholders. However, the stockholders’ perspective is not necessarily identical to that of debt holders. The two groups face different risks and rewards, and thus their informational needs are not the same. We examine the change in the information content of accounting numbers over time from the debt holders’ perspective and hypothesize about the economic and reporting factors likely to affect this change. Using the association between accounting numbers and bond valuation and returns, we find that the information content to debt holders has increased over time. In contrast, but consistent with prior studies, we find that the information content to equity holders has declined. The results suggest that the increased information content to debt holders is related to changes in credit risk and to reporting factors such as the increase in reporting conservatism, the shift towards fair value accounting, and the increase in the frequency of losses. The findings contribute to the scant literature on the use of accounting information by debt holders and the extent to which financial reporting meets their unique needs.

The documented decline in the information content of earnings numbers has paralleled the emergence of disclosures, mostly voluntary, of industry-specific key performance indicators (KPIs). We find that the incremental information content conveyed by KPI news is significant for many KPIs yet diminished when details about the computation of the KPI are absent or when the computation changes over time. Consistent with analysts responding to investor information demand, we find that analysts are more likely to produce forecasts for a KPI when that KPI has more information content and when earnings are less informative. We also analyze the properties of analysts’ KPI forecasts and find that KPI forecasts are more accurate than mechanical forecasts and their accuracy exceeds that of earnings forecasts. Our study contributes to the literature on the information content of KPIs as well as research on the properties of analysts’ forecasts. We provide evidence on whether and how to regulate voluntary disclosures.

We compare the quality of accounting numbers produced by two types of public firms—those with publicly traded equity and those with privately held equity that are nonetheless considered public by virtue of having publicly traded debt. We develop and test two hypotheses. The \"demand\" hypothesis holds that earnings of public equity firms are of higher quality than earnings of private equity firms due to stronger demand by shareholders and creditors for quality reporting. In contrast, the \"opportunistic behavior\" hypothesis posits that public equity firms, because their managers have a greater incentive to manage earnings, have lower earnings quality than their private equity peers. The results indicate that, consistent with the \"opportunistic behavior\" hypothesis, private equity firms have higher quality accruals and a lower propensity to manage income than public equity firms. We further find that public equity firms report more conservatively, in line with their greater litigation risk and agency costs.

This study examines properties of analysts' cash flow forecasts and compares them to those exhibited by analysts' earnings forecasts. Our results indicate that analysts' cash flow forecasts are less accurate than analysts' earnings forecasts and improve at a slower rate during the forecast period. Further, cash flow forecasts appear to be a naïve extension of analysts' earnings forecasts, thus providing limited information on expected changes in working capital. We also find that analysts' forecasts of cash flows are of limited information content and are only weakly associated with stock returns. Finally, estimating expected accruals as the difference between analysts' earnings forecasts and their cash flow forecasts does not result in a better detection of earnings management than achieved by commonly used accrual models.

We provide evidence that is consistent with an increase in reporting conservatism by U.S. companies in the past few decades. Using a constant sample of almost 900 companies, we examined several measures of accounting conservatism, including the level and rate of accumulation over time of negative nonoperating accruals, the differential timeliness of incorporating good news versus bad news in reported earnings, the skewness and variability of the earnings distribution relative to the cash flows distribution, and changes in the market-to-book ratio. The increased conservatism has contributed to a persistent and prevalent decline in reported profitability, an increase in the incidence of losses, and an increase in the dispersion of earnings. Increased conservatism affects financial ratios and P/E multiples. Thus, incorporating information on the level of a company's reporting conservatism improves valuations and the yield to investment strategies that are based on these ratios.