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This study explores whether exposure to macroeconomic information provides bellwether firms with information advantages at the macroeconomic level and facilitates managers to utilize such informational advantage for investment decision-making. The author tests whether firms' macroeconomic exposure is associated with sensitivity of their segment-level investments to growth opportunities and how internal and external frictions affect this association cross-sectionally.

This study follows prior research to identify high-macroinformation firms and measures the level of macroexposure based on how closely the firms' underlying business varies with macroeconomic conditions. The main specification is a segment-level regression of investment on growth opportunities and an interaction between growth opportunities and the level of macroeconomic exposure.

The results indicate a significantly positive association between firms' macroeconomic exposure and sensitivity of segment-level investments to growth opportunities, suggesting that bellwether firms can leverage their greater exposure to macroeconomic and external information to improve the quality of their investment decisions. Further evidence shows that this positive association is decreasing in firms' corporate diversification level and is also decreasing in their foreign operation level, implying that internal and external frictions could limit the information benefits ultimately gained by firms from their macroeconomic exposure.

Accounting researchers have recently documented evidence that bellwether firms' management earnings forecasts convey timely information about macroeconomic states, suggesting that managers of certain types of firms are likely to have private macroeconomic information. The main research question in this paper is motivated by incorporating insights derived from recent accounting research findings to shed further light on the impact of firms' macroexposure on their investment decision process.

This study aims to examine the association between corporate diversification and accrual quality and test whether the diversification effect hypothesis, which predicts that measurement errors in accruals ultimately decline as firms become more diversified, or the measurement error hypothesis, which predicts that these errors increase, prevails.

This study modifies an existing empirical framework that uses the downward bias inherent in earnings persistence to measure accrual reliability and applies it to a sample of firms listed on the New York Stock Exchange, American Stock Exchange and NASDAQ from 1998 to 2016.

The results indicate a significantly positive association between firms’ diversification level and accrual reliability, which suggests that the diversification effect dominates the measurement errors effect, leading to an increase in firms’ accrual quality. The authors also found additional evidence suggesting that this positive association is more pronounced when a firm’s underlying operating activities among segments are less correlated, which is consistent with the fact that the diversification effect becomes more evident if a firm participates in diverse lines of business.

This study proposes that applying fewer sets of estimation methods or assumptions to a cluster of segments could yield more measurement errors in accruals. It fills a research gap by showing that the portfolio diversification effect mitigates the detrimental effect of measurement errors in consolidated financial reporting.