Anthony Holder
Each week, Daniels is featuring a researcher who conducts meaningful research that impacts their field and the wider community. Learn more about their work in Q&As with the Daniels Research team and email them to nominate yourself or a colleague for a future Q&A.
Anthony D. Holder, PhD, CPA, is an associate professor at the Daniels College of Business He has taught at Case Western Reserve University, the University of Toledo, the University of Cincinnati and in Shanghai, China. Holder earned his BA at Park University, a Master of Accountancy at Wright State University and a PhD at the University of Cincinnati. A Certified Public Accountant, he previously worked at PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP. Holder has published extensively in respected journals, with research interests in financial reporting, accounting standards, compensation, managerial incentives, earnings management, governance, ethics/fraud and information systems. He teaches both undergraduate and graduate courses, including Accounting Information Systems and Auditing. Holder lives in Aurora, Colorado, with his wife and son, and enjoys travel, live sports, and hiking.
What was your original stream of research and how has it changed?
I started out working in corporate governance and earnings management, specifically looking at how managers might manipulate their earnings to achieve some objective. Although, I’ve published a lot of papers in this area, I have wanted to do more meaningful research. Along these lines, I have started some different (very different) research streams including ESG papers and even a history project (see below).
How do you integrate your work into the classroom?
Where possible, I have always tried to involve my students in my research projects. This is especially important for these particular research projects, given that the outcomes will most likely affect their futures far more than mine. With that in mind, I assigned an ESG research project. I had the students investigate current issues with accounting (and auditing) ESG. I also had them randomly read comment letters from the SEC’s E exposure draft. They investigated the tone of the comment letters, discussed any biases and speculated whether the SEC would be influenced by the arguments presented. Similarly, they investigated ESG disclosures for at least 20 companies and they planned an audit of ESG for one selected company. They predicted potential issues they would encounter as they planed their audit of the company’s ESG disclosures. Finally, the teams presented their results to the class.
How would you like to see your work impact the world?
In general, my ESG work makes an argument for why there should be a more standardized set of rules around ESG disclosures, ESG activity implementation and ESG assurances. It’s a pretty polarizing topic-either you love it or you hate it and this viewpoint seems to be equally split across the population (in the U.S. anyway).
What are you looking forward to researching next?
I am working on several projects in different areas. For example, I’m working with Drew Mueller (RECM) and Ben Williams (BIA) to develop an ESG score for the real estate arena that would be more reliable than the scores that are out there now. We’re also studying 10-Ks, which are heavily regulated by the SEC, much more so than ESG reports, and looking at that gap in reliability. The other ESG paper I’m working on is taking a look at the comment letters that the SEC received regarding their proposal for the new ESG reporting rules, and how those comment letters influenced the final rule.
I am also working on a paper that explores the connection between Black accountants and racial violence throughout history (with DU history professor Kimberly Jones and accounting graduate student Mayowa Alabi). We use newspaper articles from various geographical locations to show that, Black accountants, primarily working within Black businesses, played a pivotal role in transforming economic opportunities for the Black community from the Jazz Age to the Post-Civil Rights era. The article situates major racialized acts of violence against Black people in America against the backdrop of accountancy innovations and practices that buoyed Black economic entrepreneurship.
Another project relates audit quality to firm quality measures previously defined in the finance literature (with finance professors Doina Chichernea and Alex Petkevich). The quality index combines several measures—mainly determined by profitability, growth and safety—into a measure that can differentiate between quality and junk stocks. Previous work shows that high-quality firms exhibit higher prices (as expected), but also exhibit high risk-adjusted returns–which is consistent with the idea that quality stocks are underpriced on average. Building on these results, our project investigates whether quality characteristics of a given firm are connected with the quality of the audit that the firm receives from their auditors. We find that high quality firms generally pay higher audit fees and get better quality audits than their junk counterparts. Specifically, quality firms have lower lags in receiving their audit opinions and have lower likelihoods of having going concerns and of issuing restatements. The quality of their auditors is also higher-high quality firms are more likely to be audited by the big four, have a tendency of having longer auditor tenure, and are more likely to engage specialist auditors in their audit. One potential channel that could explain these results has to do with the quality of accounting information–we are currently investigating whether quality firms produce better quality accounting information, which would explain our documented results described above.