This study finds that more conservative earnings have lower information content in that higher conditional conservatism decreases the speed with which equity investor disagreement and uncertainty resolve at earnings announcements. We find that a firm-year measure of conditional conservatism we...

Despite prior research documenting that firms led by narcissistic executives experience numerous detrimental effects, narcissists are more promotable, enjoy longer tenures, and earn higher compensation than their peers. These outcomes suggest firms accrue some benefits from executive narcissism....

Existing standards prohibit disclosures of internally created intangible capital to firm balance sheets, resulting in a downward bias of reported assets. To characterize off-balance sheet intangible assets, we use transaction prices to estimate this missing intangible capital. On average, our...

Executives who own a stake in the firm that they manage tend to be under-diversified and therefore have an incentive to take real actions to smooth earnings. Using a simple principal-agent model, we show that management will use variable pay to transfer risk to employees. The variability of pay...

Executives with poor prior performance may be inclined to take excessive risk in the hope of meeting performance targets, in which case a compensation contract featuring severance pay can be optimal. While prior work has shown that severance can induce managers to take positive NPV risks, we...

This paper attempts to document the effects of accounting flexibility on managers' propensity to cut Ramp;D expenditures. Using Barton and Simko's (2002) NOA/Sales variable as a proxy for accounting flexibility, we find that managers are more (less) likely to cut Ramp;D when accounting...

In this paper, we examine the possibility that disclosure of non-GAAP earnings allows managers to satisfy market expectations with respect to firm performance without resorting to GAAP earnings management, reducing the aggressiveness of managers' GAAP reporting. In an experiment using...

Using the size of CEO signatures in SEC filings to measure individual narcissism, we find that it is associated with several negative firm outcomes. We first validate signature size as a measure of narcissism but not overconfidence using two laboratory studies, and also find that our measure is...