About

Dawn Matsumoto is a Professor of Accounting and the Chair of the Department of Accounting at the University of Washington's Foster School of Business. She holds the Gerhard G. Mueller Endowed Professorship in Accounting Education and earned her PhD from the University of Washington in 1998. Her research focuses on the interaction and communication between managers and financial analysts, and its effects on the information provided to capital markets. She has contributed extensively to the understanding of financial accounting practices, disclosure regulation, and the informational content of managerial communications. Her work has been published in leading academic journals, and she has received numerous awards and honors for her contributions to the field of accounting.

Research topics

• Accounting
• Finance
• Business
• Economics
• Management
• Microeconomics
• Actuarial science
• Econometrics
• Geography

Selected publications

• Do investor preferences affect analyst research? Evidence from Chinese dual-listed shares

  Journal of Accounting and Economics · 2026-04-01

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Capital Market-related Agglomeration Spillovers: Evidence from Million Dollar Plant Expansions

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2025-01-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• How Resilient Are Firms’ Financial Reporting Processes?

  Management Science · 2023 · 22 citations

  • Business
  • Accounting
  • Actuarial science

  The timely flow of financial information is critical for efficient capital market functioning, yet we have little understanding of firms’ and auditors’ collective abilities to maintain timely financial reporting when under duress. We use COVID as a stress test case to examine whether reporting systems can withstand systemic increases in complex economic events and coordination challenges. Despite COVID-related challenges persisting through 2020 and beyond, we document surprisingly modest average delays in financial reports during COVID and only in Q1-2020. Reporting timeliness reverts to pre-COVID levels no later than Q2-2020. We find no evidence of meaningful declines in actual reporting quality during COVID, but we do find some evidence consistent with declines in perceived reporting quality. Overall, our findings indicate that current financial reporting processes are remarkably robust and provide insights about financial reporting more broadly. In particular, given that nearly all firms were able to weather the unprecedented disruptions caused by COVID, our findings imply that most material reporting delays observed outside of COVID are likely a result of either a firm’s strategic choices or exceptionally fragile reporting processes. This paper was accepted by Ranjani Krishnan, accounting. Supplemental Material: The data and online appendix are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2023.4670 .

  PublisherDOI

• Straight from the Horse's Mouth: Determinants and Consequences of Managers’ Conference Call Participation

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2023-01-01 · 4 citations

  articleOpen access
  PublisherDOI

• Geographic Peer Effects in Management Earnings Forecasts*

  Contemporary Accounting Research · 2022 · 72 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Business
  • Economics
  • Accounting

  ABSTRACT Because of clear economic links among industry peers, prior work has focused on documenting industry peer effects in various settings. Yet, while links also exist among firms in the same geographic area, few studies document geographic peer effects. We fill this gap by examining whether there are geographic peer effects in management earnings forecasts. We find that the likelihood that a firm voluntarily provides an earnings forecast is sensitive to the extent to which other firms in the same geographic area provide earnings forecasts. This geographic peer effect in forecasting is stronger for firms with greater exposure to local institutional investors, and when firms do forecast, liquidity improves more when a larger fraction of their geographic peers forecast. Furthermore, we use instrumental variable techniques to help alleviate the concern that these geographic peer effects are driven by omitted local economic factors that can lead firms to make similar disclosure decisions. Overall, our findings suggest that geographic peer effects in disclosure choices arise in part due to firms responding to capital market incentives created by local investors. Our study, therefore, contributes to the literature by documenting a unique dimension of forecasting decisions.

  PublisherDOI

• How Resilient are Firms’ Financial Reporting Processes?

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2022-01-01 · 8 citations

  articleOpen access
  PublisherDOI

• Implied Tradeoffs of Chief Financial Officer Accounting Expertise: Evidence from Firm-Manager Matching

  Management Science · 2020 · 37 citations

  • Accounting
  • Business
  • Finance

  We present evidence that although individuals with accounting expertise bring key skills to the financial reporting responsibilities of the chief financial officer (CFO) position, they tend to lack educational and career experiences relevant to nonaccounting responsibilities (e.g., operations and strategy). Assuming boards’ perceptions of CFO accounting expertise are correct on average, we provide evidence of tradeoffs of CFO accounting expertise by examining how differences in CFO backgrounds shape executive employment decisions. Firms with greater demand for nonaccounting expertise are less likely to hire an accounting expert CFO, consistent with ex ante firm-manager matching. Ex post, significant declines in firm-manager fit predict CFO turnover and other compensating changes in the composition of the senior management team. Accounting expert CFOs are also less likely to become chief executive officers, suggesting that CFO experience does not fully mitigate these tradeoffs. Collectively, the results suggest important tradeoffs inherent to CFO accounting expertise that shape the structure of the senior management team. This paper was accepted by Suraj Srinivasan, accounting.

  PublisherDOI

• The Price of Being Foreign: Stock Market Penalties Associated with Accounting Irregularities for U.S.‐Listed Foreign Firms

  Contemporary Accounting Research · 2019-05-15 · 19 citations

  article

  ABSTRACT We examine the stock market consequences of disclosing accounting irregularities for U.S.‐listed foreign firms. After controlling for the severity of the irregularity and other firm characteristics, we find that foreign firms experience significantly more negative short‐window stock market reactions following irregularity announcements than do U.S. firms. Moreover, for a subsample of 64 irregularities of foreign firms that are listed on both a U.S. and home country stock exchange, we find evidence that restating firms' U.S. investors react more negatively to the same irregularity than their home country investors. This differential market reaction appears related to firm‐specific information risks that are greater for foreign firms than U.S. firms. Collectively, consistent with the reputational bonding hypothesis in prior literature, our results suggest that accounting irregularities cause U.S. investors to reassess the information risk associated with foreign firms.

  PublisherDOI

• Geographic Peer Effects in Management

  ScholarSpace (University of Hawaii at Manoa) · 2017-08-29

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  We find that the likelihood that a firm voluntarily provides an earnings forecast is sensitive to the extent to which other firms in the same geographic area provide earnings forecasts. We use instrumental variable techniques to alleviate the concern that these geographic peer effects are driven by omitted economic factors unique to a local area that lead firms to make similar disclosure decisions. Our findings imply that geographic peer effects in disclosure choices arise in part due to firms trying to avoid negative capital market effects induced by market pressure from local institutional investors. The evidence does not suggest that information sharing among firms plays a key role in generating these geographic peer effects.

  Publisher

• The Effect of Industry Co-Location on Analysts' Information Acquisition Costs

  The Accounting Review · 2017-03-01 · 93 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  ABSTRACT We examine how the co-location of firms in the same industry affects analysts' cost of gathering and processing information. We find that when the firms in an analyst's portfolio are located farther away from other firms in the same industry, the analyst's portfolio size is smaller and average forecast accuracy is lower. We further find that the additional costs that analysts incur to follow distant firms are amplified when earnings are more difficult to forecast. Last, we provide some evidence that managers are more knowledgeable about other firms in the same geographic area. Specifically, managers are more likely to reference firms in their industry that are geographically closer during conference calls. This paper provides additional evidence that the co-location of firms in the same industry not only affects operating and strategic decisions (as documented in the existing literature), but also analysts' costs of gathering and analyzing information about the firm. JEL Classifications: D83; M40; M41; R10; R12.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Weili Ge

  University of Washington

  10 shared

• Jenny Li Zhang

  8 shared

• Gregory S. Miller

  Ross School

  8 shared

• Sarah Shaikh

  University of Washington

  8 shared

• Angela K. Davis

  University of Oregon

  7 shared

• Shuping Chen

  7 shared

• Shivaram Rajgopal

  Columbia University

  6 shared

• Robert M. Bowen

  Chapman University

  6 shared

Awards & honors

• William A. and Helen I. Fowler Endowment for Special Achieve…
• Undergraduate Professor of the Quarter for Accounting, Autum…
• American Accounting Association Financial Accounting and Rep…
• Dean's Junior Faculty Research Award (2003)
• American Accounting Association Competitive Manuscript Award…