厦门大学会计学系助理教授沈江华的论文 “The unintended benefit of the risk factor mandate of 2005” (与香港科技大学Allen Huang教授和 Amy Zang教授合作) 近日被会计领域Top5期刊之一的Review of Accounting Studies在线发表。

Abstract：

In 2005, the SEC mandated that firms disclose risk factors to provide useful information about firm risk. An unintended effect of the mandate is that mandatory risk factor (RF) disclosure may constitute “meaningful cautionary language” as defined in the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act, and may therefore provide legal protection for forward-looking statements (FLSs). Using both a difference-in-differences design and a two-stage least squares approach, we find that, following the mandate, firms that had not previously disclosed risk factors (late RF disclosers) became more willing to provide qualitative FLSs, particularly positive ones, than other firms. This finding is consistent with our prediction that, for late RF disclosers, the mandate reduces managers’ perceived litigation risk. We also find that these firms experience improvement in their information environment. A path analysis reveals that the mandate improves firms’ information environment not only directly but also indirectly by prompting more disclosure of positive FLSs, illustrating an unintended benefit of the 2005 RF mandate. Cross-sectional tests show that the RF mandate induces a larger increase in positive FLSs for firms whose managers perceive a higher level of benefit from safe harbor protection arising from meaningful cautionary statements.

作者简介：

沈江华，2018年毕业于香港科技大学、获得会计学博士学位，同年加入厦门大学会计学系任教，现为厦门大学会计学系助理教授，研究领域涉及信息披露，债务契约与公司治理等。