Publication Type
Working Paper
Publication Date
6-2018
Abstract
Using a landmark Supreme Court decision as a natural experiment, I examine the impact of a fundamental requirement in securities litigation, the ex post loss rule, on income-decreasing accounting choices. Dura Pharmaceuticals v. Broudo (2005) established that plaintiffs must show that the alleged misrepresentations caused an actual economic loss. The case resolved a circuit split, allowing me to identify a treatment jurisdiction affected by Dura, and control jurisdictions in which the rule was already the prevailing legal standard. Motivated by legal analyses suggesting that Dura incentivizes firms to delay negative corrections, I hypothesize and find that treatment firms in high-litigation industries became more likely to delay write-downs and income-decreasing accrual error reversals at the firm level after Dura, relative to matched control firms. This paper sheds light on the relationship between securities law and accounting practices, and informs policy makers on the accounting impact of a key feature of the legal environment.
Keywords
Write-downs, Accruals, Supreme Court, Securities Litigation
Discipline
Accounting | Accounting Law
Research Areas
Corporate Reporting and Disclosure
First Page
1
Last Page
68
Identifier
10.2139/ssrn.2857703
Publisher
SSRN
Citation
TAN, Teck Meng Junior.
Accounting choices and the legal environment: The impact of the ex post loss rule. (2018). 1-68.
Available at: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/soa_research/1723
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.
Additional URL
https://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2857703