Electronic Theses and Dissertations - Open Access
Permanent URI for this collectionhttps://hdl.handle.net/20.500.12588/2237
This collection contains electronic UTSA theses and dissertations (ETDs), primarily from 2005 to present. The collection is not comprehensive; search the UTSA Library Catalog for a complete list of UTSA theses and dissertations.
All of the ETDs in this collection are available to the general public. However, authors are able to request an embargo. Embargoed ETDs will not be downloadable until after their embargo expires.
Authors of these ETDs have retained their copyright while granting UTSA Libraries the non-exclusive right to reproduce and distribute their works.
Former students are invited to broaden access to their thesis or dissertation by making it available in the Open Access collection. To initiate this process, or if you have any questions about the ETD collection, please contact rrpress@utsa.edu.Browse
Browsing Electronic Theses and Dissertations - Open Access by Department "Accounting"
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Item Compensating Controls and Agency Conflicts in the Absence of Owners: The Case of Nonprofit Charter Schools(2017) Bradley, Jean RybergThis dissertation consists of three essays using publicly reported internal control deficiencies to examine agency conflicts in the unique organizational setting provided by nonprofit charter schools. In my first essay, I find evidence that increased agency conflicts in nonprofit charter schools are not associated with increased internal control weaknesses, as charter schools are less likely to disclose internal control weaknesses in federal single audits than are (1) nonprofits in general and (2) traditional public schools in California and Texas serving students in the same communities. My second essay finds evidence that charter school Boards of Directors consider both current and prior year internal control weaknesses when setting executive compensation, rewarding managers who show improvements in controls. My third essay examines the relationship between reported internal control weaknesses and subsequent behavior of external stakeholders, including donors and customers. I find that, contrary to prior research, contributions to nonprofit charter schools are positively associated with prior year reports of internal control deficiencies. This outcome may reflect donors' responding to control weaknesses by increasing support for schools without resources sufficient to implement adequate internal controls, or it may indicate that donors are committed to the mission of the school and are not dissuaded by the presence of internal control issues. In contrast, I find no relationship between customer demand as measured by student enrollment, indicating that customers (i.e., students and their parents) are either unaware of or unconcerned by reports of internal control deficiencies. This dissertation will help inform the debate over internal control reporting and its efficacy as a governance mechanism for nonprofits, thereby providing information useful to donors, taxpayers, and other constituents in making resource allocation decisions, including requirements for federal single audits.Item Essays examining the association between going concern audit opinions, subsequent earnings management and engagement office audit and reporting quality(2014) Brooks, Marcus R.This dissertation consists of two essays that examine the association between going concern audit opinions, subsequent earnings management and engagement office audit and reporting quality. Essay I (Chapter 1) examines the earnings management behavior of financially distressed firms following the receipt of a going concern opinion. The results indicate that financially distressed firms, unable to improve their financial condition through the manipulation of accounting accruals, report large magnitudes of negative discretionary and working capital accruals. As a result, these firms turn their attention to the manipulation of real operational activities. By engaging in various forms of real activity manipulation, financially distressed firms are able to reduce reported expenses, conserve cash, and most importantly, avoid bankruptcy and/or the receipt of a subsequent going concern opinion, despite being in financial distress. Essay II (Chapter 2) investigates whether audit quality and reporting accuracy is associated with engagement office propensity to issue going concern opinions. The findings from this study show clients of engagement offices with a high propensity to issue going concern audit opinions are associated with large magnitudes of income decreasing discretionary accruals, suggesting that these engagement offices require their clients to report more conservatively. The findings also show that these engagement offices' financial statement conservatism carries over to their financial reporting decision-making. The conservative reporting posture of these engagement offices leads them to issue going concern audit opinions to subsequently viable clients, leading to higher type I error rates. Overall, this dissertation contributes to the accounting literature addressing going concern audit reporting by creating two new variables that help to explain the association between the receipt of a prior going concern audit opinion and subsequent earnings management, and the association between engagement office propensity to issue going concern audit opinions and audit and reporting quality. The variables created could open a new stream of literature aimed at addressing earnings management behavior and choices following the receipt of a going concern opinion and also demonstrate that more attention should be directed to the characteristics of individual engagement offices because they are the ultimate determining factor of an audit firm's overall audit and reporting quality. Together, the studies show how important it is to analyze the effects of going concern audit reports and how they are associated with seemingly unrelated topics in accounting literature.Item Two Essays on the Influence of Performance-Based Environment, Social, and Governance (ESG) Vesting Provisions in Executive Compensation(2023) Philip, Teena RachelThis dissertation comprises of two essays that examine the use of performance-based environmental, social, and governance (ESG) options, stocks, and cash grants to chief executive officers (CEOs) in large U.S. firms from 1998 to 2020 and its influence on earnings attributes. Though investors are increasingly considering firms with better ESG performance, there is substantial disagreement on whether firms incorporate ESG measures in their strategic decisions, compensation practices, and corporate reporting, as mere window dressing, or as a legitimate tool to improve corporate social performance and increase firm value (Haque 2017; Gillan, Koch, and Starks 2021). Even with the increasing prominence in performance-based ESG grants, there is limited prior empirical evidence on this topic. This study focusses on filling the gap in compensation literature by classifying non-financial metrics in CEO compensation into environmental, social, and governance measures, estimating the fair value of the grants in a systematic and complete manner, and manually collecting metric weights from annual proxy statements (DEF 14-A fillings). Equipped with such values, I examine the influence of ESG-based grants on earnings attributes (Francis, LaFond, Olsson, and Schipper 2004). In the first essay of my dissertation, "Performance-Based Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) in Executive Compensation: A Descriptive Analysis", I document the emergence of performance-contingent (p-c) grants including the increase in use of ESG related metrics in executive compensation. I examine certain characteristics of p-c ESG grants, such as grants that are based on an absolute or relative metrics, have a cliff or ratable vesting schedule, and grants that are paid out as equity or cash. I also document the grant-date fair values (GDFVs) of ESG, accounting, stock-price-based grants and calculate the proportion of these performance-based grants relative to all performance-based executive pay in a year. I examine potential determinants of p-c ESG grants, including firm-specific characteristics, executive-specific characteristics, and corporate governance factors that can influence the frequency and magnitude of ESG-based compensation. I find that the use of p-c ESG grants is positively associated with the post-2005 period, market cap, earnings volatility, stock return volatility, and firm sales. While the use of p-c ESG grants is negatively associated with market-to-book and if CEO is also the chairman of the board. On average, firms that make p-c ESG grants have larger boards, more independent boards, and boards with financial expertise. In my second essay, "CEO Performance-based Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) Vesting Provisions and Earnings Attributes", I examine the influence of CEO's equity and cash p-c grants with ESG vesting provisions on seven attributes of earnings: accrual quality, predictability, smoothness, persistence, value relevance, timeliness, and conservatism (Francis et al. 2004). I find that firms that give p-c ESG grants to their CEOs are associated with poorer earnings quality. This finding is robust to controls for innate determinants of earnings attributes (such as cash flow variability, sales variability, operating cycle, incidence of loss, intangible intensity, intangible use, capital intensity, and ROA), CEO characteristics and incentives (such as age, tenure, gender, delta, and vega of a CEO) and governance related measures (such as board size, board independence, board financial expertise). When examining other attributes of earnings, I find some evidence that firms that award p-c ESG grants have less predictable earnings, less smooth earning, less persistent earnings, and less relevant earnings. However, these results seem to be sensitive to model specifications. When examining sub-groups of ESG, I find mixed results: p-c ESG grants with social metrics are mostly associated with poorer earnings attributes such as lower earnings quality and less persistent earnings. Additional analyses show that the association between p-c ESG grants and earnings attributes are primarily attributable to p-c ESG grants with cliff vesting schedule and ESG cash grants. Supplementary analyses suggest that these findings are robust to alternate model specifications using a Heckman two-step approach to control for self-selection issues and fixed effects regressions which control for time-invariant omitted factors. I believe that evidence from this study provides important insights regarding these innovative compensation practices, which may be of interest to regulators and market participants.