Education

Ph.D. in Accounting, 2022

University of Southern California

Contact information

vpandey4@simon.rochester.edu

Vivek Pandey is an Assistant Professor of Accounting at the University of Rochester Simon Business School.

Pandey’s research broadly focuses on empirical accounting, intersecting with political economy, labor economics, and corporate finance. He has a special interest in how various frictions (e.g., informational, contractual, individual beliefs) and innovations (e.g., transparency) both shape and are influenced by the behavior of and interactions between firms, employees, investors, regulators, and auditors. His research has examined a range of topics related to regulatory actions, political ideology, market feedback, supply chains, and financial and non-financial disclosures and transparency. His research is published in the Journal of Accounting and Economics and The Accounting Review.

Pandey teaches Corporate Financial Accounting in the MBA program, helping managers and leaders become better consumers of accounting information and thereby better decision makers. Prior to joining the University of Rochester in 2022, he obtained a Ph.D. from the University of Southern California and an MBA from the Indian Institute of Management.

Working Papers

  • We study the influence of political partisanship in SEC investigations and AAER enforcement actions against financial misconduct. We find that the SEC is more likely to launch an investigation against a firm that is misaligned with the agency's political ideology than for other firms. The likelihood of an AAER appears unaffected by political misalignment, but once named in an AAER, a misaligned firm faces harsher penalties than other firms. We find higher Type I error rates (more false positives) in SEC investigations among misaligned firms and higher Type II error rates (more false negatives) among non-misaligned firms, suggesting misallocation of scarce enforcement resources due to partisanship.

  • While recent studies highlight the beneficial role of stock prices in providing market feedback, theory highlights that stock prices are less suitable for market feedback during bad times than good times because they impound not only the short-term degradation in cash flows but also their potential long-term improvement given managers' corrective actions. We hypothesize that bonds, especially short-maturity, suffer less from this anticipated corrective action problem and could provide market feedback during bad times. Using a regulatory intervention that induced greater market transparency in the bond market as a plausibly exogenous shock to the feedback role of bond prices, we document managerial learning from bond prices that is indeed greater for shorter-maturity bonds (despite longer-duration bonds being more information-sensitive), when bond prices decline, and during periods of high informed trading. Our study offers bond prices as an alternative feedback medium, and in doing so also extends the economic consequences of market transparency.

The Visible Hand and Faculty Contracts: Anti-Tenure Movement and Faculty Quality(with Xingyu Shen, Joanna Wu, and Xixi Xiao)

  • Certain Republican states have recently introduced policies threatening faculty tenure protection at public universities. Using granular, individual-level faculty data for the (near) universe of tenure-granting universities in the U.S. and a difference-in-differences design with university fixed effects, we find that these policies significantly reduce public universities’ ability to hire top-quality faculty, while private universities in these states (with similar political and social environments) remain unaffected. The impact is greater at public universities serving more racial and ethnic minority populations, often with smaller endowments. The effect spans junior and senior faculty and various academic fields. Importantly, faculty labor market appears to price the increased turnover risk in compensation. Treated universities also see reduced prospective student demand. Other prominent state laws not directly about tenure but favored by conservative groups – campus carry gun laws and increased restrictions on abortion providers – do not have the same negative impact on faculty quality. This study offers the first evidence on how weakening tenure protections affects universities. We caution that insufficient time may have passed to observe all effects, including the potentially improved ability to dismiss underperforming faculty. [Draft not posted publicly]

  • Suppliers can enter contracts with customers to receive periodic private forecasts of the customers' future demand for the suppliers' products ("DF contracts"). While such contractual disclosures can aid suppliers' real decisions, they can discourage informed trading – the key mechanism that transmits information from financial markets to managers and facilitates managerial learning. Using hand-collected data, I find that after entering a DF contract for the first time, suppliers' investment-q sensitivity significantly declines. Consistent with reduced managerial learning from financial markets, informed trading in the suppliers' stock declines, indicating that increased private disclosures crowd out informed traders in financial markets. Further tests suggest that the decrease in investment-q sensitivity is greater for more credible private disclosures, when demand uncertainty is high, and when investments are highly irreversible. Overall, this study uncovers a previously overlooked cost of contractual private disclosures in supply chains – reduced managerial learning from financial markets.

Publications

Client Concerns About Information Spillovers From Sharing Audit Partners (with Jungkoo Kang and Clive Lennox) [Journal of Accounting and Economics, 2022, 73 (1), 101434]

  • We hypothesize that companies in the same product market avoid sharing the same audit partner when they are concerned about possible information spillovers. Consistent with our hypothesis, we find that product market rivals are less likely to share the same partner when they perceive that information spillovers are more costly. While concerns about information spillovers significantly reduce the likelihood of product market rivals sharing the same audit partner, we find that such concerns do not deter them from sharing the same audit office. Lastly, when companies are unconcerned with information spillovers, our results suggest that partner sharing can be beneficial because it can result in lower audit fees and fewer accounting misstatements.

  • We use the staggered adoption of the Universal Demand Laws (UD Laws) to examine the effect of an exogenous reduction in shareholders' ability to litigate on the extent of accounting conservatism. On average, we find an increase in reporting conservatism post-UD. The increased conservatism is concentrated in firms that contemplate equity issuance, with a high proportion of monitoring investors, and high corporate governance quality. In contrast, firms with specific short-term incentives for aggressive accounting—such as those narrowly beating benchmarks, those with abnormal insider trading, and those likely to violate debt covenants—weakly governed firms, and firms with high ex ante litigation risk decrease reporting conservatism after UD. Our results suggest that the relation between the litigation environment and reporting conservatism is complex and dependent on specific characteristics and unique circumstances of the firms.