Our study examines whether the certification requirements under Section 302 of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 affect financial reporting decisions. Using 74 part-time MBA students as a proxy for corporate managers, we find that the participants' level of moral reasoning and their assessed influence of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act were significantly positively associated with the amount of loss recognized through their financial statement adjustment decisions. Consistent with expectations, there was also a significant interaction whereby the influence of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act was significantly positively associated with the adjustment decision for those participants at lower levels of moral reasoning, but not with the adjustment decision for those participants at higher levels. Thus, the findings from our study suggest that the Sarbanes-Oxley Act may be an effective deterrent for an overstatement of financial statement income by individuals at lower levels of moral reasoning. These results should be of considerable interest to regulators as they attempt to assess the effects of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act.

This paper investigates whether the increases and decreases to earnings and stockholders' equity presented in 20-F reconciliations influence perceptions of the risk of investing, the quality of the accounting principles, and the financial performance of the reporting firm. The research results indicate that subjects perceive the risk of a hypothetical firm filing a 20-F reconciliation with reconciliation decreases to be higher, and the quality of accounting principles lower, than a hypothetical firm either complying with U.S. GAAP or filing a 20-F reconciliation with reconciliation increases. Additional analysis suggests that these significant effects are due to a negative effect from the reconciliation decrease consistent with the effects predicted by attribute framing theory. The findings have implications for the SEC as they consider whether foreign registrants on U.S. exchanges should be allowed to comply with International Accounting Standards (IAS) without reconciliation to U.S. GAAP. These findings also have implications for foreign registrants on U.S. exchanges. The results indicate that firms that have higher non-U.S. GAAP earnings (and a consequent reconciliation decrease) should comply with U.S. GAAP as the reporting of a reconciliation decrease creates a negative perception of the firm.

Reacting to the criticism that companies routinely mislead investors by emphasizing non-GAAP or pro forma numbers, the SEC promulgated Regulation G in 2003, which requires firms to provide a reconciliation of the pro forma and GAAP numbers. In this study, we conduct an experiment to examine how investors' GAAP and non-GAAP earnings performance assessments affect their financial evaluations and investment decisions based on the presentation format of the reconciliation (presenting a full non-GAAP income statement, referred to as the full NGIS format, versus presenting only the items that caused the difference between GAAP and non-GAAP measures, referred to as the summary NGIS format). We find that even though a summary NGIS format for the reconciliation of pro forma earnings does not increase the perceived non-GAAP earnings performance, it does increase the weight given to non-GAAP earnings performance when making investment-related judgments and decisions, relative to a full NGIS format. These findings regarding the evaluation and weighting of non-GAAP earnings performance extend prior studies and suggest that non-GAAP earnings information may be processed differently based upon the format of the reconciliation. Further, our finding regarding the weighting of non-GAAP earnings performance is inconsistent with the concern expressed by the SEC that the full NGIS format may give greater prominence to non-GAAP information. Finally, the implications of these findings for regulators, investors, and future research are discussed. Data Availability: Contact the authors.

In this study, we construct explanations for the taxation of social security benefits based on previously identified dimensions of fairness (exchange, horizontal, and vertical equity). We then conduct an experiment to examine whether providing senior citizen taxpayers with explanations increases the perceived fairness of taxing social security. The results indicate that for those subjects with the greatest self-interest (subjects currently taxed on a portion of their social security benefits), the exchange equity explanation had the most consistent positive effects on both acceptance of the explanation and on the perceived fairness of taxing social security benefits. On the other hand, for those subjects not currently taxed on their social security benefits, the vertical equity explanation was more likely to be accepted than either the exchange or horizontal equity explanation. However, while these subjects agreed with the vertical equity explanation, it did not increase their fairness perceptions. These findings illustrate how important it is for tax policy makers striving to increase perceptions of fairness to carefully consider and develop explanations for tax provisions.

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