Tyler Kleppe's paper, "PCAOB Inspections, Knowledge Diffusion, and Corporate Tax Planning Effectiveness" was recently accepted for presentation at multiple highly-competitive research conferences, including the 2022 Deloitte/University of Kansas Auditing Symposium and the 12th EIASM Conference on Current Research in Taxation. The paper is co-authored with James Justin Blann (University of Arizona) and Nathan Goldman (North Carolina State University).

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Tyler Kleppe's paper, "Climate-Related Uncertainty and Managerial Short-Termism" was recently covered by the Duke University School of Law FinReg Blog. The paper studies the effect of climate-related uncertainty on managerial short-termism. The FinReg Blog is sponsored by the Duke Financial Economics Center. The blog is a forum for financial policy and regulatory scholars, as well as finance practitioners, to express their views on all things finance and regulation. Read Full Blog Post

Abstract

This study explores whether shocks to climate-related uncertainty induce increased managerial short-termism. Theory suggests that when individuals face long-run uncertainty, they often resort to short-termism to realize more immediate and certain benefits. Consistent with this, we expect that increases in climate-related uncertainty will lead to greater managerial myopia. We use extreme weather events to capture increases in climate-related uncertainty, and we use real earnings management (REM) to proxy for managerial short-termism. Using a difference-in-differences empirical design to exploit within-firm variation in extreme weather exposure across time, we find that managers increase REM when exposed to more weather events. We also find that this relation varies predictably with several cross-sectional factors, including firms’ susceptibility to climate-related uncertainty, external monitoring, and managerial incentives. Finally, we find that extreme weather exposure is associated with an increased incidence of “just meeting” earnings benchmarks and a reduction in innovative output. This study contributes to the literature examining the consequences of increases in climate-related uncertainty by providing new evidence on how managers respond to the growing threat of weather events. Our findings also provide empirical evidence supporting concerns raised by major investors and corporate executives over the potential influence of extreme weather exposure on managerial short-termism.