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We predict and find that accounting restatements that adversely affect shareholder wealth at the restating firm also induce share price declines among non-restating firms in the same industry. These share price declines are unrelated to changes in analysts' earnings forecasts, but instead seem to reflect investors' accounting quality concerns. Peer firms with high industry-adjusted accruals experience a more pronounced share price decline than do low-accrual firms. This accounting contagion effect is concentrated among revenue restatements by relatively large firms in the industry. We also find that investors impose a larger penalty on the stock prices of peer firms with high earnings and high accruals when peer and restating firms use the same external auditor. Our results are consistent with the notion that some accounting restatements cause investors to reassess the financial statement information previously released by non-restating firms.

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We examine how informed trading activities affect the market reaction to accounting restatements. We find significantly less negative reactions to accounting restatements when managers are net purchasers of stock before the restatement, and significantly more negative market reactions when managers are net sellers. Similar patterns characterize corporate trading, where prior stock repurchases dampen negative reactions and prior equity issuances increase negative reactions to the restatement. We address the possibility of reverse causality in which informed trades are undertaken because of the expected market reaction by examining the difference between disclosed and non-disclosed trades, finding that the market reaction is concentrated in the disclosed trades. Our results are incremental to general return patterns associated with insider trading and corporate equity transactions, and hold after controlling for other determinants of the market reaction to restatements. Taken together, these findings suggest that investors use informed trading activities to help interpret and price accounting restatements. JEL Classifications: M41, M42. Data Availability: Data are publicly available from the sources identified in the study.

SUMMARY: Audit fee negotiations conclude with the signing of an engagement letter, typically the first quarter of the year under audit. Yet investors do not learn the audit fee paid until disclosed in the following year's definitive proxy statement. We conjecture that negotiated audit fees impound auditors' consequential private, client-specific knowledge about “bad news” events investors will learn eventually. We demonstrate that a proxy for the year-to-year change in the negotiated audit fee has an economically meaningful positive association with proxies for public realizations of “bad news” events that occur during the roughly 12-month period between the negotiation of the audit fee and the disclosure of the audit fee paid. Our results suggest that negotiated audit fees contain information meaningful to investors and that if disclosed proximate to the signing of the engagement letter instead of the following year, information asymmetry between managers and investors would be reduced. JEL Classifications: G19, D89, M40. Data Availability: Available from public sources identified in the text.