The pervasiveness of option backdating practices has resulted in broad regulatory scrutiny, formal investigations by federal authorities and internal inquiries by more than 200 implicated companies. Prior studies (Yermack 1997; Aboody and Kasznik 2000; Lie 2005; Heron and Lie 2006) find a pattern of timing...

When annual earnings are regressed on annual returns, the returns coefficient is higher when returns are negative. The difference between the coefficients of earnings on positive and negative returns is called asymmetric timeliness of earnings and, in the accounting literature, is used...

The goal of this study is to compare and contrast the market performance of Brazilian companies that have implemented a full scale EVA financial management system under Stern Stewart amp; Co. guidance with that of the broad national stock market index, the Ibovespa index and also a comparison...

This paper investigates the role of earnings per share management in the decision to repurchase shares. We identify the conditions under which repurchases increase EPS and document the frequency of EPS increasing and EPS decreasing repurchases among U.S. firms from 1988 to 2001. We then compare...

In this paper we offer explanations for why firms began voluntarily adopting the expensing provisions of FAS 123 in the second half of 2002. First, we find that firms with greater publicity exposure are more likely to voluntarily expense stock options, controlling for other factors such as the...

Keynote Address to the European Financial Management Association, London, June 2002This paper received the European Financial Management Readers' Choice Best Paper Award for 2004My intention today is to provide a way to understand some of what's currently happening in the world of finance and...

The empirical research examining the association between typical measures of corporate governance and various accounting and economic outcomes has not produced a consistent set of results. We believe that these mixed results are partially attributable to the difficulty in generating reliable and...

I analyze the long-run performance and earnings management behavior of equity carve-outs conditioned on whether the executives received incentive stock options at the IPO date. Carve-outs that did not grant incentive stock options subsequently underperform both relative to the overall market and...

We show that female directors have a significant impact on board inputs and firm outcomes. In a sample of US firms, we find that female directors have better attendance records than male directors, male directors have fewer attendance problems the more gender-diverse the board is, and women are...