Education

Ph.D. in Accounting, 2022

University of Southern California

Contact information

vpandey4@simon.rochester.edu

Vivek Pandey is an Assistant Professor of Accounting at the University of Rochester Simon Business School.

Pandey’s research centers on empirical accounting, often interesting with political economy and labor economics. He has a special interest in how frictions (e.g., informational, contractual, or belief-driven) and innovations like transparency shape and are shaped by financial, labor, and other markets. His recent work spans regulatory actions, political ideology, market feedback, supply chains, and disclosures. His research is published in top academic journals such as the Journal of Accounting and Economics and The Accounting Review.

Pandey teaches Corporate Financial Accounting in the MBA program, helping managers and leaders become better consumers of accounting information and thereby better decision makers. Prior to joining the University of Rochester in 2022, he obtained a Ph.D. from the University of Southern California and an MBA from the Indian Institute of Management.

Publications

Partisan Regulatory Actions: Evidence from the SEC (with Xingyu Shen and Joanna Wu) [Journal of Accounting and Economics, 2025]

  • We study the influence of political partisanship in SEC investigations and AAER enforcement actions against financial misconduct. We find that the SEC is more likely to launch an investigation against a firm that is misaligned with the agency’s political ideology than for other firms. The likelihood of an AAER appears unaffected by political misalignment, but once named in an AAER, a misaligned firm faces harsher penalties than other firms. We find evidence that collectively points to potential misallocation of scarce enforcement resources due to partisanship: conditional on investigation, misaligned firms are less likely to receive an enforcement action, and conditional on misreporting, non-misaligned firms are less likely to be investigated.

Client Concerns About Information Spillovers From Sharing Audit Partners (with Jungkoo Kang and Clive Lennox) [Journal of Accounting and Economics, 2022, 73 (1), 101434]

  • We hypothesize that companies in the same product market avoid sharing the same audit partner when they are concerned about possible information spillovers. Consistent with our hypothesis, we find that product market rivals are less likely to share the same partner when they perceive that information spillovers are more costly. While concerns about information spillovers significantly reduce the likelihood of product market rivals sharing the same audit partner, we find that such concerns do not deter them from sharing the same audit office. Lastly, when companies are unconcerned with information spillovers, our results suggest that partner sharing can be beneficial because it can result in lower audit fees and fewer accounting misstatements.

  • We use the staggered adoption of the Universal Demand Laws (UD Laws) to examine the effect of an exogenous reduction in shareholders' ability to litigate on the extent of accounting conservatism. On average, we find an increase in reporting conservatism post-UD. The increased conservatism is concentrated in firms that contemplate equity issuance, with a high proportion of monitoring investors, and high corporate governance quality. In contrast, firms with specific short-term incentives for aggressive accounting—such as those narrowly beating benchmarks, those with abnormal insider trading, and those likely to violate debt covenants—weakly governed firms, and firms with high ex ante litigation risk decrease reporting conservatism after UD. Our results suggest that the relation between the litigation environment and reporting conservatism is complex and dependent on specific characteristics and unique circumstances of the firms.

Working Papers

  • While recent studies highlight the beneficial role of stock prices in providing market feedback, theory highlights that stock prices are less suitable for market feedback during bad times than good times because they impound not only the short-term degradation in cash flows but also their potential long-term improvement given managers' corrective actions. We hypothesize that bonds, especially short-maturity, suffer less from this anticipated corrective action problem and could provide market feedback during bad times. Using a regulatory intervention that induced greater market transparency in the bond market as a plausibly exogenous shock to the feedback role of bond prices, we document managerial learning from bond prices that is indeed greater for shorter-maturity bonds (despite longer-duration bonds being more information-sensitive), when bond prices decline, and during periods of high informed trading. Our study offers bond prices as an alternative feedback medium, and in doing so also extends the economic consequences of market transparency.

Contractual Private Disclosures in Supply-Chains and Managerial Learning from Financial Markets

  • I examine whether contracts that require customers to privately share with suppliers forecasts of their future demand for the supplier’s product (“demand forecast contracts,” or ”DF contracts”) affect the supplier’s reliance on an alternative information source — stock prices — when making investment decisions. If suppliers find these forecasts a more direct signal of future demand than stock prices, they may reduce their reliance on stock prices to guide investments. Using hand-collected data, I find that suppliers’ investments become significantly less sensitive to stock prices after entering a DF contract for the first time. This effect is stronger when forecasts are likely more credible, demand is more uncertain, and investments are more irreversible. Suppliers also show improved future performance, as measured by return on assets and cash flow from operations. Overall, these findings suggest that when a relatively direct information source about future demand becomes available, managers reduce their reliance on stock prices in making real decisions.

  • On-the-job training is a key driver of human capital development (Becker, 1962). We argue that the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX), aimed at strengthening auditor independence, changed the economics of public accounting and unintentionally reduced opportunities for accountants to invest in their human capital on the job. SOX barred public accounting firms from offering consulting services to audit clients and introduced barriers to accountants transitioning to client firms. This weakened opportunities for collaboration between audit and consulting, limited accountants’ exposure to addressing clients’ business problems, and reduced networking. This diminished opportunities for accountants to gain broad experience, develop skills, and grow professional networks, making the accounting profession less attractive, especially to top talent. Using individual-level data, we compare accountants (treated group) and consultants (bechmark group) before and after SOX, within the same public accounting firm, time, and location. After SOX, accountants were less likely to move into consulting roles or to client (and non-client) firms, and their wages declined. Consistent with reduced career opportunities discouraging accounting education, we find a drop in the quality of students declaring accounting majors after SOX. Importantly, to more directly connect career opportunities to university accounting enrollments, we show that when university alumni transitions from public accounting to consulting decline, both the quantity and quality of subsequent accounting enrollments at their alma maters drop. We uncover a previously overlooked cost of regulations concerning the accounting profession.

  • We examine whether firms apply partisan standards in responding to employee financial misconduct. Using detailed individual-level data on financial advisers, we find that, following misconduct, advisers who are political minorities at their firms are significantly more likely to depart than non-minority transgressing colleagues at the same firm and time — a pattern we term “partisan punishment standards.'' This pattern is especially pronounced at firms with low internal information quality. We also document “partisan reporting standards”: firms are more likely to publicly disclose misconduct by political minority advisers while remaining relatively silent in other cases. Importantly, political minority advisers are no more likely to commit misconduct or to reoffend. Firms that exhibit partisan punishment practices subsequently experience slower growth. These findings align with models of discrimination based on taste or biased beliefs.