Proprietary Information Cost of Contracting with the Government

We thank Andrew Van Buskirk (editor), two anonymous reviewers, Amanda Badger, Matthew Cedergren, John Campbell (discussant), Bill Cready, Zhaoyang Gu, Umit Gurun, Daniel Huang, Ying Huang, Yongtae Kim, Allison Koester (discussant), Siqi Li, Xiaoji Lin, Zihua Liu (discussant), Gerardo Pérez-Cavazos, Hyungshin Park, Suresh Radhakrishnan, Thomas Rauter (discussant), Guoman She, Richard Sloan, Zheng Wang, Claire Yan (discussant), George Yang, workshop participants at Arizona State University, Baruch College–CUNY, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Fordham University, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Renmin University, University of Alberta, The University of Hong Kong, The University of Texas at Dallas, and The University of Texas at San Antonio; and participants of the 2020 SMU Accounting Symposium, the 2021 American Accounting Association (AAA) Financial Accounting and Reporting Section (FARS) Midyear Meeting, and the 2021 AAA Annual Meeting for their helpful discussions and comments. We are grateful to USASpending.gov and Federal Service Desk for numerous clarifications on the government contract data. We acknowledge excellent research assistance by Aurelia Wang. Kevin Li acknowledges research support from the Leavey Research Grant.

Jiapeng He, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, CUHK Business School, School of Accountancy, Shatin, Hong Kong, China; Kevin Li, Santa Clara University, Leavey School of Business, Department of Accounting, Santa Clara, CA, USA; Ningzhong Li, The University of Texas at Dallas, Naveen Jindal School of Management, Richardson, TX, USA; Weining Zhang, Cheung Kong Graduate School of Business, Dongcheng District, Beijing, China.

Editor’s note: Accepted by Andrew Van Buskirk, under the Senior Editorship of W. Robert Knechel.