This study finds that the financial press serves an important monitoring role by interpreting the tone of corporate announcements, moderating its impact to market participants in the process. Using textual analysis, we report that the press attenuates both the positive and negative tone of...

We examine the role of voluntary corporate press releases about firms' financial performance as a stimulus for financial media coverage. We find that there is a spike of media articles on the same day and one trading day following firms' press releases. We provide evidence that managers compete...

This paper provides new UK evidence on the relationship between managerialincentives and firm risk using a hand-collected database of 3307 executive yearobservations (698 CEO years and 2609 other executive years). We find that therelation between pay performance sensitivity and firm risk...

We examine the effect of IFRS on the use of accounting-based performance measures for evaluating and rewarding managers. We show that post-IFRS firms decrease the weight of Earnings-per-Share (EPS) based performance measures in CEO pay contracts. We provide indications that IFRS add “noise”...

This paper investigates the motives for disclosing an alternative Earnings per Share (EPS) figure. In particular, we extend prior findings for the UK (Choi, Lin, Walker & Young, 2007) by highlighting the role of managerial contracting in the alternative EPS disclosure choice. We examine a...

We examine whether UK managers exploited the discretion provided in the UK GAAP to IFRS reconciliation process to manage earnings and whether this earnings management is associated with the structure of the managers' compensation contracts. Using a comprehensive dataset, mainly hand-collected...

This paper provides new evidence on the effect of compensation consultants on CEO pay. We show that the use of a compensation consultant has an increasing effect on the level of total CEO compensation, which is consistent with the “ratcheting up” effect of consultants on CEO pay argued by...

This paper provides new evidence on the relationship between managerial incentives and firm risk using a hand-collected database of 3307 executive year observations. We find that the relation between pay performance sensitivity and firm risk exhibits a nonlinear relationship with firm size: for...

This paper examines the executive compensation practices of listed UK retailing companies. We compare New Economy retailers (e-commerce and dot.coms) to more traditional retailers operating in the quot;Old Economyquot;. We also discriminate between recently floated retailers and their more...

We document that analysts cater to short-term investors by issuing optimistic target prices. Catering dominates among analysts at brokers without an investment banking arm as they face lower reputational cost. The market does not see through the analyst catering activity and their forecasts lead...