We examine the impact of institutional ownership on financial reporting discretion,
focusing on whether the impact varies with institutions’ cost of acquiring monitoring
information. Using geographic distance between the firm and the institutional investor
as a proxy for the cost of acquiring monitoring information, we find that corporate
managers are less likely to use financial reporting discretion in the presence of local
monitoring institutions than distant monitoring institutions. We also find that the
impact of monitoring institutions on financial reporting discretion varies with the costs
and benefits of financial reporting discretion
1. Introduction
We examine the impact of institutional ownership on financial reporting discretion, focusing on whether the impact
varies with institutions’ cost of acquiring information about financial reporting discretion (hereafter, monitoring
information). We posit that geographic distance between the firm and a monitoring institutional investor impacts the
institution’s cost of acquiring monitoring information and predict that corporate managers are less likely to use financial
reporting discretion in the presence of local monitoring institutions (our proxy for monitors with low information costs)
than distant monitoring institutions. We base our expectation on two streams of research: (1) prior findings that
institutional investors located in proximity to the firm are more informed than other institutional investors located far
away and (2) prior research that suggests information asymmetry between the firm and stakeholders is a necessary
condition for managers to engage in the use of opportunistic reporting discretion.3,4 We argue that the close geographic