Reputation Repair after a Serious Restatement

52 Pages Posted: 22 Oct 2013 Last revised: 29 Jan 2020

See all articles by Jivas Chakravarthy

Jivas Chakravarthy

University of Texas-Arlington

Ed deHaan

Stanford Graduate School of Business

Shivaram Rajgopal

Columbia University - Columbia Business School, Accounting, Business Law & Taxation

Multiple version iconThere are 2 versions of this paper

Date Written: July 2014

Abstract

How do firms repair their reputations after a serious accounting restatement? To answer this question, we review firms’ press releases and identify 1,765 reputation-building actions taken by: (i) 94 restating firms in the periods before and after their restatement; and (ii) a set of matched control firms during contemporaneous periods. We posit that firms have incentives to target multiple stakeholders in a reputation repair strategy — including capital providers, customers, employees, and geographic communities — and that actions targeting each group generate positive market returns as reputation capital is repaired. Consistent with our predictions, the frequency of, and stock returns to, reputation-building actions are greater for restating firms in the period after their restatement than for the control groups. In addition, firm characteristics predict the types of stakeholders targeted by firms. Finally, actions targeted at both capital providers and other stakeholders are associated with improvements in the restating firm’s financial reporting credibility.

Keywords: Corporate reputation, accounting restatements, reputation repair, corporate social responsibility, earnings credibility

JEL Classification: D21, G30, M41

Suggested Citation

Chakravarthy, Jivas and deHaan, Ed and Rajgopal, Shivaram, Reputation Repair after a Serious Restatement (July 2014). The Accounting Review 89.4 (Jul 2014): 1329., Rock Center for Corporate Governance at Stanford University Working Paper No. 163, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2343321 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2343321

Jivas Chakravarthy

University of Texas-Arlington ( email )

Arlington, TX 76013
United States

Ed DeHaan

Stanford Graduate School of Business ( email )

655 Knight Way
Stanford, 94305
United States

Shivaram Rajgopal (Contact Author)

Columbia University - Columbia Business School, Accounting, Business Law & Taxation ( email )

3022 Broadway
New York, NY 10027
United States

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