Causal Evidence on the Effects of Enforcement Investigations

We examine the firm-level consequences of financial reporting enforcement investigations using proprietary data on risk-based and randomly selected investigations in Germany. We find that risk-based firms take longer to file financial reports, become opaque, and experience abnormal returns of -15.4 percent when under investigation. In contrast, randomly selected firms do not show any abnormal changes. This result is not due to inherent differences in investigation intensity between risk-based and randomly selected investigations. Instead, the negative consequences of risk-based selected investigations are the result of selection. Collectively, we document that investigations per se do not cause significant costs or benefits.