The Silent Majority: Private U.S. Firms and Financial Reporting Choices
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
ABSTRACT This study uses a comprehensive panel of tax returns to examine the financial reporting choices of medium‐to‐large private U.S. firms, a setting that controls over $9 trillion in capital, vastly outnumbers public U.S. firms across all industries, yet has no financial reporting mandates. We find that nearly two‐thirds of these firms do not produce audited GAAP financial statements. Guided by an agency theory framework, we find that size, ownership dispersion, external debt, and trade credit are positively associated with the choice to produce audited GAAP financial statements, while asset tangibility, age, and internal debt are generally negatively related to this choice. Our findings reveal that (1) equity capital and trade credit exhibit significant explanatory power, suggesting that the primary focus in the literature on debt is too narrow; (2) firm youth, growth, and R&D are positively associated with audited GAAP reporting, reflecting important monitoring roles of financial reporting; and (3) many firms violate standard explanations for financial reporting choices and substantial unexplained heterogeneity in financial reporting remains. We conclude by identifying opportunities for future research.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.006 | 0.010 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it