We acknowledge at least three significant limitations associated with our research design
choices. First, our proxy for financial reporting quality is based on whether companies meet or beat
their consensus analyst earnings forecast, and our proxy undoubtedly measures this underlying
construct with noise (Prawitt et al. 2009). Specifically, we could observe that a company meets or
beats its consensus analyst earnings forecast if the company’s underlying economic performance
was truly in line with (or better than) expectations, or if the company’s management guided their
analyst forecasts down to a reasonable earnings expectation (Richardson, Teoh, and Wysocki
2004). Neither of these explanations for why a company meets or beats its consensus analyst
earnings forecast would be due to lower financial reporting quality. Thus, there is substantial noise
in our dependent variable. Second, we primarily examine one proxy for financial reporting quality.
Future research may wish to systematically examine whether our results hold if other measures,