Accounting involves assigning numbers to events-quantifying them. Conventional wisdom holds that putting numbers to an argument enhances its persuasive power. However, little scholarly evidence exists to support or refute this claim, in accounting or elsewhere. In this paper, we develop an...

Avoiding continued investment in poorly performing projects is an important function of management control systems. However, prior research suggests that managers fail to use accounting information indicating that a project is performing poorly to discontinue it; that is, they escalate...

Individual investors increasingly rely on investment advice from social media platforms. Even advice with little, if any, predictive value appears to influence investor decisions. Our study reports the results of two experiments that help explain why investors rely on such advice. We find that...

U.S. auditors are concerned that the greater imprecision in accounting standards under IFRS will lead to increased legal liability. We conduct an experiment with 749 mock jurors to examine how juries evaluate auditor conduct under precise and imprecise standards. We find that juries return more...

We interview 24 very experienced auditors about how they audit complex accounting estimates such as fair values and impairments and what problems they experience in the process. We find that auditors overwhelmingly choose to audit the details of management's estimate rather than use other...

Auditors frequently seek informal advice from peers to improve judgment quality, but the conditions under which advice improves auditor judgment are poorly understood. We predict and find evidence of a trust heuristic among auditors receiving advice from advisors with whom they share a social...

Auditors are subject to litigation exposure under federal securities laws and under state law. Research into auditors' liability under federal securities laws tends to make use of publicly available data from class action suits to examine factors associated with the incidence of litigation...

We experimentally examine the effects of trait professional skepticism on fraud brainstorming performance. We find that groups with a minority, but not a majority, of high trait skeptics assess fraud risk higher than control groups with no high trait skeptics. These effects persist to group...

: Regulators and researchers provide evidence that auditors’ judgment quality is problematic in complex audit tasks. We introduce a framework for improving auditor judgment in these tasks. The framework builds on dual-process theory to recognize that high-quality judgment in complex tasks...

This paper reports the results of an experiment that examines how analyst forecast accuracy (i.e., how close an analyst's forecast is to realized earnings) and forecast boldness (i.e. how far the analyst's forecast is from the consensus forecast) affect the analyst's perceived credibility and...