Yangxin Yu

City University of Hong Kong | CityU · Department of Accountancy

This study examines whether and how Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (PCAOB) international inspections mitigate the market value discount in cash holdings. We find that shareholders value internal cash holdings more highly for the non-U.S.-listed clients of inspected auditors after the public disclosure of the auditors’ inspection reports....

In this study, we examine the impact of social capital surrounding firms’ headquarters on their chief executive officers (CEOs)’ pay duration, reflected by the vesting periods of the short‐term and long‐term components in their annual compensation. Our analysis reveals that CEO pay duration increases with the level of social capital in the county i...

The Securities and Exchange Commission has associated readability with a range of linguistic features largely determined by the language style of the information producers, including sentence length and the use of personal pronouns, familiar words, surplus words and active voice. We examine the impact of a firm's workforce ethnic diversity on its f...

Theoretical studies suggest that, when determining the workplace safety level, CEOs face a trade-off between ex ante safety-improving expenditures and the expected losses due to ex post injury and illness occurrences. We examine whether firms with higher CEO inside debt holdings have safer workplaces. Using establishment-level employee workplace in...

We examine whether local political corruption affects managers' discretionary disclosures of non-GAAP earnings. Using United States Department of Justice data on the number of corruption convictions of government officials, we find that firms headquartered in more corrupt districts (1) are less likely to report non-GAAP earnings, (2) have less aggr...

We examine whether local political corruption affects managers' discretionary disclosures of non-GAAP earnings. Using United States Department of Justice data on the number of corruption convictions of government officials, we find that firms headquartered in more corrupt districts (1) are less likely to report non-GAAP earnings, (2) have less aggr...

This study investigates how managers in firms that have committed fraud strategically use socially responsible activities in coordination with their fraudulent financial reporting practices. Using propensity score matching to select control firms that have a similar probability of fraud in the pre-fraud benchmark period, we find that the corporate...

While prior studies generally support that equity-based compensation induces CEOs to manipulate financial reporting, there is limited direct empirical evidence on whether financial misreporting concerns affect compensation design. A key challenge for establishing a causal relationship is that misreporting incentives and compensation policies are of...

Using a newly developed institutional investor distraction measure, we examine whether auditors increase their risk assessment when clients’ institutional investors temporarily reduce their monitoring activities. We find that audit fees and audit report lags increase during periods when institutional investors temporarily focus their attention on o...

We examine the impact of financial statement comparability on managers’ use of corporate resources. Using the comparability measures of De Franco, Kothari, and Verdi as proxies for financial statement comparability, we find that, as comparability increases, corporate cash holdings are worth more to outside shareholders, capital expenditure contribu...

This study examines the relation between a firm’s business strategy and its corporate social responsibility (CSR) performance. Using a comprehensive measure of business strategy based on the Miles and Snow (Organizational strategy, structure, and process, McGraw-Hill, New York, 1978, Organizational strategy, structure, and process, Stanford Univers...

This study investigates whether distracted passive institutional shareholders influence firm transparency. To capture distraction, we exploit industry shocks that happen to partial stocks of investor portfolios and shift investor attention away from unrelated stocks. Consistent with a reduction in monitoring intensity, we find that firms with distr...

This study examines the conditions under which local social environments are likely to influence corporate tax behavior. Using a social capital index at the county level, we find that on average, social capital reduces firms’ aggressive tax avoidance behavior. The impact of social capital on corporate tax avoidance is weaker when managers are under...

Research summary This study examines the impact of financial analysts on a firm's corporate social performance (CSP). We integrate research on time horizons with stakeholder theory and argue that, in response to short‐term pressure from financial analysts, firms and their managers become more short‐term focused and limit investment in socially resp...

This study examines the impact of chief executive officer (CEO) ability on firms’ corporate social responsibility (CSR) performance. We find that firms’ CSR performance increases with CEO ability. Specifically, firms with more able CEOs are associated with more socially responsible activities and fewer socially irresponsible activities, and are ass...

Using brokerage mergers and closures as two sources of exogenous shock to analyst coverage, this study explores the causal effect of analyst coverage on ex ante expected crash risk as captured by the options implied volatility smirk. We find a significant increase in a firm's ex ante expected crash risk subsequent to an exogenous drop in analyst co...

Following the introduction of SOX in 2002 and the introduction of PCAOB inspections starting from 2003, DeFond and Lennox (2011) found that a large number of small auditors exited the SEC client audit market during the 2002–2004 period and that these exiting auditors were of lower quality relative to non-exiting auditors. This paper seeks to verify...

This study examines whether auditors regard market pressure on client management as contributing to audit risk. The literature suggests that when management jobs are threatened by negative market reaction to poor mergers and acquisitions investment, managers are more likely to misstate financial statements in the post-investment period, due to pres...

This study investigates whether corporate social responsibility (CSR) reports mitigate the value destruction associated with increases in cash holdings. We find that the issuance of a standalone CSR report increases the marginal value of cash holdings and this effect is more pronounced for firms in a less transparent information environment and for...

Research summary : A firm's strategic investments in knowledge‐based assets through research and development ( R&D ) can generate economic rents for the firm, and thus are expected to affect positively a firm's financial performance. However, weak protection of minority shareholders, weak property rights, and ineffective law enforcement can allow t...

To enhance board oversight, since 2002, US legislation has required listed companies to have a majority independent board. This paper uses this legislative change to examine the relation between board independence and audit fees. To provide a clean estimate of this relation, we adopt a difference-in-difference approach using a sample matched on cli...

This study examines the impact of financial statement comparability on ex ante crash risk. Using the comparability measures of De Franco, Kothari, and Verdi (2011), we find that expected crash risk decreases with financial statement comparability, and this negative relation is more pronounced in an environment where managers are more prone to withh...

We examine the economic impact of analysts’ cash flow forecasts by looking at how external auditors respond to financial analysts’ issuance of cash flow forecasts. Using a differences-in-differences approach, we find that financial analysts’ initiation of cash flow forecasts leads to reduced auditor fees and audit report lags. Moreover, after cash...

This study investigates whether corporate social responsibility (CSR) reports mitigate the value destruction associated with increases in cash holdings. We find that the issuance of a standalone CSR report increases the marginal value of cash holdings. We find that this effect is stronger for firms with higher information opacity and for firms with...

To deter financial misstatements, many companies have recently adopted compensation recovery policies—commonly known as “clawbacks”—that authorize the board to recoup compensation paid to executives based on misstated financial reports. Clawbacks have been shown to reduce financial misstatements and increase investors' confidence on earnings inform...

Prior literature documents that executive compensation influences managerial risk preferences through executives’ portfolio sensitivities to changes in stock prices (delta) and stock-return volatility (vega). Large deltas discourage managerial risk-taking, while large vegas encourage risk-taking. Theory suggests that auditors charge higher audit fe...

While firm-initiated compensation recovery (or clawback) provisions are gaining popularity and the recently enacted Dodd-Frank Act seeks to make the clawback of erroneously awarded compensation mandatory for all listed companies, little is known about their effectiveness. We find that the incidence of accounting restatements declines after firms in...

We examine how corporate transparency and financing choices differ for family and non-family firms in the S&P 1500 Index. While transparency on average is better for firms in the S&P 500 Index than for firms in the S&P MidCap 400 and S&P SmallCap 600 indices, the improvement is much larger for family firms. Outside the S&P 500, family firms are les...