Investor Reactions to Key Audit Matters: Financial and Non-Financial Contexts

We investigate how a disclosed risk item and key audit matter (KAM) relatedness combine to affect investors’ riskiness assessment in financial and non-financial contexts. When management disclose a high-risk item, we find that investors react the same way across contexts with KAM relatedness having no effect. When management disclose a low-risk item, investors react differently in each context. When a KAM is related to the disclosed financial (non-financial) low-risk item, investors assess investment riskiness higher (lower) than when a KAM is unrelated to the low-risk item. Our findings indicate the varying communicative value of KAMs across financial and non-financial contexts.