We develop a firm-specific measure of the most important intangible asset - organization capital - and document that organization capital is associated with five years of future operating and stock return performance, after controlling for other factors. Thus, our organization capital measure...

This paper shows that firms near a broad credit rating change, that is, a rating with a plus or minus specification, tend to inflate their reported earnings more than firms that are not near a broad credit rating change. Our measures of earnings inflation are discretionary accruals and...

This paper examines the effects of promotion-based tournament incentives for non-CEO executives on corporate innovation. We find that firms with greater tournament incentives, which are measured as the pay gap between the CEO and other executives, are associated with a higher level of patent...

Recent theory suggests that firms incorporate synergistic interrelationships among executives into optimal incentive design (Edmans et al. 2013). We focus on Pay Performance Sensitivities (PPS) and use dispersion in PPS across top executives as a proxy for the incentive design component shaped...

Positive accounting theory predicts that conservative financial reporting averts GAAP-based litigation. However, very little empirical evidence addresses whether and how accounting conservatism provides these benefits. Using a sample of lawsuits against public companies for alleged violations of...

This paper investigates whether firms have incentives to opportunistically manipulate real activities to meet analysts' cash flow forecasts and the economic consequence of such manipulation. Using the measurements of real activities manipulation from Roychowdhury (2006), I find that shows that...

We document that Chinese city officials are more likely to be promoted if firms under their jurisdictions receive less negative media coverage towards their term-ends. Consequently, local officials suppress negative news of local companies at their term-ends. Such distortion worsens the...

We investigate the effect of the career concerns of young CEOs and of female CEOs on their willingness to issue voluntary earnings forecasts. We argue that the labor market's perception about a young CEO's uncertain talent leads to a stronger desire to establish a good reputation by issuing more...

In 2005, the SEC enacted the Securities Offering Reform (Reform), which relaxes ‘gun jumping' restrictions, thereby allowing firms to more freely disclose information before equity offerings. We examine the effect of the Reform on voluntary disclosure behavior before equity offerings and the...

We empirically examine the profitability of leading Chinese firms, benchmarked against comparable US firms, for the period 2005-13. Return on invested capital (ROIC), which excludes leverage effects on performance, provides the primary metric. Averaged over firms and years, the two sets of firms...