Accounting fraud and the relevance of corporate information for investors
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Data
2026-03-11
Autores
Pain, Patrícia
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Universidade Federal do Espírito Santo
Resumo
This doctoral dissertation examines how the publicization of accounting fraud affects the informational relevance of corporate disclosures for investors. Integrating agency theory and the efficient market hypothesis (EMH) with behavioral finance perspectives, particularly mosaic theory, limited attention theory, and dual-process theory, the study conceptualizes accounting fraud as a credibility shock that disrupts the agency contract, alters the price formation pro cess, and reshapes how investors reconstruct firm value. While EMH predicts price adjustments following new information, this dissertation argues that accounting fraud disclosure does more than trigger immediate returns, it intensifies investors’ demand for verification, monitoring, and reinterpretation of subsequent disclosures, thereby increasing overall informational relevance. However, this increase is asymmetrically distributed across investor types. The dissertation comprises three complementary papers. The first paper presents a systematic literature re view (from 2000 to 2024), synthesizing evidence on investor reactions to fraud disclosure and identifying a gap regarding how credibility shocks reshape the process of information integra tion across heterogeneous investors. The second paper provides archival market-level evidence consistent with agency theory and EMH, showing that fraud represents a rupture in the infor mational contract between managers and shareholders. Following accounting fraud disclosure, investors intensify monitoring (reflected in abnormal trading volume and liquidity measures) and react more strongly to new financial disclosures, yet apply persistent valuation discounts. These findings indicate that disclosure relevance increases even though credibility is not fully restored, revealing that market efficiency operates through heightened scrutiny rather than blind incorporation. Building on this market-level trigger, the third paper shifts the analysis to the investor level. Grounded in mosaic theory, it argues that fraud disrupts the informational mosaic previously used to value the firm, requiring reconstruction through greater reliance on assurance, governance, and verification signals. A Delphi study with professional investors (PI) demonstrates that they recalibrate their informational priorities post-accounting fraud, expanding their mosaics and intensifying analytical monitoring. In contrast, an experiment with non-professional investors (NPI), using eye-tracking, mouse-tracking, and choice models, shows that cognitive constraints predicted by limited attention theory and heuristic processing described by dual-process theory limit their ability to reconstruct this mosaic. NPI do not significantly increase engagement with complex or assurance-related disclosures, resulting in lower incremental informational relevance under accounting fraud conditions. Collectively, the f indings support the thesis that the relevance of corporate reports increases when accounting fraud is disclosed, but that this increase is significantly stronger for PI than for NPI. Fraud is therefore not a transitory event but a structural disruption to the informational environ ment, it amplifies monitoring and disclosure relevance at the market level, while simultaneously deepening informational asymmetries at the investor level. By linking classical market theo ries (agency theory and EMH) to behavioral mechanisms of information integration (mosaic, limited attention, and dual-process), this dissertation advances the literature on accounting dis closure, investor behavior, and accounting fraud, and offers implications for disclosure design and regulatory frameworks that explicitly account for investor heterogeneity
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Fraude contábil , Fraude contábil , Relevância da informação corporativa , Mercados de capitais , Investidores profissionais , Investidores não profissionais , Accounting fraud , Corporate information relevance , Capital markets , Professional investors , Non-professional investor