Professor Hui Chen, University of Zurich
Professor Chen joined the University of Zurich in August 2014 as an assistant professor of accounting (tenure track). Her research primarily addresses the economic effects of accounting regulations and practices. Specifically, her recent work examines how accounting affects product markets. How, for example, does mandatory accounting conservatism change a product market structure? Or how can insider trading soften product market competition? Another of her research interest is the political economy of accounting. How do public accounting firms lobby for their clients? What is the economic return on corporate lobbying? She employs both modeling and data analysis technics in her research, and her work has been cited by influential news outlets, such as The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Forbes, and USA Today. You can access her recent working papers here.
Before Zurich, Professor Chen was an assistant professor of accounting at the University of Colorado. She earned her doctorate from the University of Tennessee.
Title and Abstract: Misreporting and Feedback Effect
Stock price often provides firms with new information, which can be used in the firms' subsequent real decisions. We examine how this informational feedback from the financial market affects a myopic firm manager's incentive to misreport, and how the misreporting further affects the firm's price and value. We find that the manager overstates his report more in the presence of feedback, but this misreporting brings forth both positive price and real effects for the firm. Intuitively, overstating the report encourages information production in the market because (a) it renders accounting reports less reliable as a source of information, and (b) investors expect higher trading profits from larger capital investment. The new incremental information improves investment efficiency when it is revealed to the firm manager through trading and used in the firm's subsequent investment decisions. As a consequence, the capital investment is higher when there is feedback effect.