We examine whether financial reporting quality improves after firms voluntarily adopt a compensation clawback provision. Clawback provisions allow companies to recoup excess incentive pay in the event of an accounting restatement, and are intended to ex ante deter managers from publishing...

This paper examines the impact of politicians' ideological preferences on corporate taxation. Our tests exploit the implementation of the Reform and Opening-up policy in China in 1978 that significantly weakens the communist ideology. We find that, in the post-reform period, the effective tax...

Employee turnover is a significant cost for businesses and a key human capital metric, but firms do not disclose this measure. We examine whether turnover is informative about future firm performance using a large panel of turnover data extracted from employees’ online profiles. We find that...

This paper develops and validates a measure of tax accrual quality. Tax accrual quality captures variation in the extent to which the income tax accrual maps into income tax-related cash flows, with lower variation indicating a higher quality tax accrual. Low tax accrual quality arises from (1)...

We examine the effects of the July 2021 expansion of the Child Tax Credit (CTC). We analyze detailed transactions data for 2019 through September 2021, utilizing a difference-in-differences design, and controlling for state-time specific conditions. We find that recipients of expanded CTC...

We examine whether internal governance affects the extent of real earnings management in U.S. corporations. Internal governance refers to the process through which key subordinate executives provide checks and balances in the organization and affect corporate decisions. Using the number of years...

A distinctive feature of stock options is that they create incentives for managers to take risks. For a sample of 6,439 CEO-year observations over 1992-1999, we find that risk-taking incentives offered by CEO's stock options (the sensitivity of ESO values to stock return volatility) are...

We examine whether executive stock options (ESOs) provide managers with incentives to invest in risky projects. For a sample of oil and gas producers, we examine whether the coefficient of variation of future cash flows from exploration activity (our proxy for exploration risk) increases with...

Human capital is a key factor in value creation in the modern corporation. Yet the disclosure of investment in human capital is scant. We propose that a company's online job postings are disclosures made outside of the investor relations channel that contain forward-looking information that...

We examine whether executive stock options (ESO) encourage managers to make risky investments on behalf of shareholders. For a sample of oil and gas producers, we find, as predicted, that the variance of cash flows from exploration activity and the extent of price risk exposure hedged are...