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This paper examines a real cost of awarding employee stock options. Based on the observation that managers are extremely concerned about earnings‐per‐share dilution in equity related compensation, we predict and find that firms experiencing significant employee stock option (ESO) exercises shift resources away from real investments towards the repurchase of their own stocks. We further find weak evidence of a decline in subsequent firm performance (as measured by return on assets) for several years following the cut in discretionary investments as a result of stock option exercises, though this result is sensitive to the metric used to measure performance. Collectively, our findings indicate that ESO exercises potentially impose a real cost on the firm in terms of foregone investment opportunities.

Accounting standard setters face a perpetual challenge in balancing relevance and reliability when establishing generally accepted accounting principles. This tension is especially heightened when the nature of the economic information concerns intangible assets. This article presents exploratory evidence about standard setters’ response to this challenge by examining whether Statement of Financial Accounting Standards No. 142 (SFAS 142): Goodwill and Other Intangible Assets altered the information content of goodwill write-offs. To more accurately capture the information of goodwill write-offs, the authors first create a model to estimate expected impairments. The difference between actual write-offs and expected write-offs represents write-off surprises or unexpected goodwill write-offs. The authors document a negative and significant stock market reaction to unexpected goodwill write-offs. On a cross-sectional basis, they find that the market reaction is attenuated for firms with low information asymmetry (their proxy is a high analyst following) and for firms that find it relatively costly to implement impairment tests (their proxy is the inverse of firm size). The authors find no variation in market reaction based on firm complexity (their proxy is the number of firm segments). The negative reaction for the high information asymmetry and larger firms weakens following the adoption of SFAS 142. The latter result is consistent with SFAS 142 critics’ claims that more relevant accounting information, captured by fair value methods, is difficult to implement reliably and thus can reduce the information content of accounting reports.

We use confidential, U.S. Census Bureau, plant-level data to investigate aggregation in external reporting. We compare firms' plant-level data to their published segment reports, conducting our tests by grouping a firm's plants that share the same four-digit SIC code into a "pseudo-segment." We then determine whether that pseudo-segment is disclosed as an external segment, or whether it is subsumed into a different business unit for external reporting purposes. We find pseudo-segments are more likely to be aggregated within a line-of-business segment when the agency and proprietary costs of separately reporting the pseudo-segment are higher and when firm and pseudo-segment characteristics allow for more discretion in the application of segment reporting rules. For firms reporting multiple external segments, aggregation of pseudosegments is driven by both agency and proprietary costs. However, for firms reporting a single external segment, we find no evidence of an agency cost motive for aggregation.

We investigate the role played by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) in monitoring fair value disclosures in regulatory filings. Specifically, we assess whether SEC action via the issuance of fair value comment letters to registrants is followed by reductions in uncertainty about the firms' fair value estimates. We hypothesize that registrants that receive a comment letter focusing on their fair value disclosure policies experience reductions in investor uncertainty regarding their fair value estimates in the post-letter period, compared to the pre-letter period. Supporting this prediction, we find that for the periods after the fair value comment letters, the associations between Level 2 and 3 fair value assets and our measures of uncertainty are significantly reduced. These findings are robust to a series of tests designed to ensure that we do not simply capture general changes in market uncertainty levels for firms investing in these types of assets. Our study contributes to the further understanding of market participants' perception of fair value disclosures by investigating the role of SEC enforcement. This finding is important given recent criticisms of fair value reporting emanating from the highest levels of government and industry. Data Availability: Data are available from public sources identified in the paper.