Education
Ph.D., 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.
His research centers on empirical accounting, often interesting with political economy and labor economics. His research is published in top academic journals such as the Journal of Accounting and Economics and The Accounting Review. His research has won several competitive awards. He serves on the editorial board of Contemporary Accounting Research.
He teaches Corporate Financial Accounting in the MBA program, helping managers and leaders become better consumers of accounting information and thereby better decision makers. He has been named to the Dean’s Teaching Honor Roll. 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.
Publications
Contractual Private Disclosures in Supply Chains and Managerial Learning from Financial Markets (sole-authored dissertation) [The Accounting Review, forthcoming]
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I examine whether contracts that require customers to privately share with suppliers forecasts of their future demand for the supplier’s product (“demand forecast contracts,” or ”DF contracts”) affect the supplier’s reliance on an alternative information source — stock prices — when making investment decisions. If suppliers find these forecasts a more direct signal of future demand than stock prices, they may reduce their reliance on stock prices to guide investments. Using hand-collected data, I find that suppliers’ investments become significantly less sensitive to stock prices after entering a DF contract for the first time. This effect is stronger when forecasts are likely more credible, demand is more uncertain, and investments are more irreversible. Suppliers also show improved future performance, as measured by return on assets and cash flow from operations. Overall, these findings suggest that when a relatively direct information source about future demand becomes available, managers reduce their reliance on stock prices in making real decisions.
Independence at What Cost? Regulation, Accounting Careers, and Human Capital (with Xingyu Shen, Joanna Wu, and Xixi Xiao) [Journal of Accounting and Economics, forthcoming]
— 2025 Journal of Accounting and Economics Conference paper
— Winner, 2026 FARS Connecting to Practice Award
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On-the-job training is a key driver of human capital development (Becker, 1962). We argue that the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX), aimed at strengthening auditor independence, changed the economics of public accounting and unintentionally reduced opportunities for accountants to invest in their human capital on the job. SOX barred public accounting firms from offering consulting services to audit clients and introduced barriers to accountants transitioning to client firms. This weakened opportunities for collaboration between audit and consulting, limited accountants’ exposure to addressing clients’ business problems, and reduced networking. This diminished opportunities for accountants to gain broad experience, develop skills, and grow professional networks, making the accounting profession less attractive, especially to top talent. Using individual-level data, we compare accountants (treated group) and consultants (bechmark group) before and after SOX, within the same public accounting firm, time, and location. After SOX, accountants were less likely to move into consulting roles or to clients of their audit firms, and their wages declined. Consistent with reduced career opportunities discouraging accounting education, we find a drop in the quality of students declaring accounting majors after SOX. Importantly, to more directly connect career opportunities to university accounting enrollments, we show that when university alumni transitions from public accounting to consulting decline, both the quantity and quality of subsequent accounting enrollments at their alma maters drop. We uncover a previously overlooked cost of regulations concerning the accounting profession.
Partisan Regulatory Actions: Evidence from the SEC (with Xingyu Shen and Joanna Wu) [Journal of Accounting and Economics, 2025]
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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 evidence that collectively points to potential misallocation of scarce enforcement resources due to partisanship: conditional on investigation, misaligned firms are less likely to receive an enforcement action, and conditional on misreporting, non-misaligned firms are less likely to be investigated.
Client Concerns About Information Spillovers From Sharing Audit Partners (with Jungkoo Kang and Clive Lennox) [Journal of Accounting and Economics, 2022, 73 (1), 101434]
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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.
Shareholder Litigation and Conservative Accounting: Evidence from Universal Demand Laws (with Hariom Manchiraju and K.R. Subramanyam) [The Accounting Review, 2021, 96 (2), 391–412]
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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.
Working Papers
Geopolitical Tensions and Supply Chain Disclosures: Evidence from Shipment Redactions (with Yifei Lu, Joanna Wu, and John Yang )
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We examine whether geopolitical tensions between the U.S. and foreign countries influence U.S. firms' disclosure of suppliers in those countries. U.S. firms sourcing supplies from foreign countries facing higher tensions with the U.S. may face more intense scrutiny at home over these business ties and, as a result, be more reticent in disclosing ties to these foreign suppliers. Using granular shipment-level data covering around 148 million U.S. import shipments from 150 countries, we find that supplier identities are more likely to be concealed in import shipments from countries facing higher geopolitical tensions with the U.S., within the same product in the same year. Consistent with the incentive to avoid attention from the government, the effect is significantly more pronounced in industries facing higher regulatory scrutiny and when the foreign suppliers are more likely to have ties to their own governments. The effect is more pronounced in lower valued imports likely attributable to small and medium enterprises (SMEs) that face weaker information demand from capital markets. The effect is significantly more prevalent for more geopolitically sensitive products, for capital goods, and for more complex products. We highlight geopolitical tensions as an important force shaping supply chain disclosures in today's global economy.
Partisanship, Information, and Punishment for Misconduct at Work (with Joanna Wu and Yuanzhe Zhang)
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We examine whether firms apply partisan standards when responding to employee financial misconduct. Using detailed individual-level data on financial advisers, we find that advisers who are in the political minority at their firm (political minority advisers) are no different from their colleagues at the same firm and time in the incidence and severity of misconduct, yet following misconduct, they are significantly more likely to depart -- a pattern we term “partisan punishment standards.” This pattern is especially pronounced at firms with lower internal information quality, proxied with i) external reporting quality (for public firms only), ii) private firms (relative to public firms), and iii) the hiring of an independent public accountant to create an internal control report (for both public and private firms). We also document “partisan reporting standards”: firms are more likely to publicly disclose misconduct by political minority advisers while remaining relatively silent in other cases. Firms that exhibit partisan punishment practices subsequently experience slower growth.
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While public debt markets are a critical source of financing and prior work shows that public debt market signals reflect firm fundamentals, it remains unclear whether they also play an informational role in shaping corporate investments. We address this question by exploiting a regulatory intervention under which the corporate bond markets transitioned from opaque to transparent. We find that the sensitivity of corporate investments to bond credit spreads increases significantly after the transparency shock, particularly for firms whose bond prices embed more of investors’ private information. Consistent with an informational role, firm performance improves. The effect is concentrated in firms subject to stronger institutional investor monitoring and is not explained solely by debt financing or dividend policies. Overall, the evidence highlights a two-way flow of information between public debt markets and firms: bond markets not only reflect but also inform real corporate decisions.
Tenure Contracts and Human Capital Allocation (with Xingyu Shen, Joanna Wu, and Xixi Xiao)