The purpose of our study is to further understand managerial incentives that affect the volatility of reported fiscal-year earnings. We do this by examining income smoothing based on pseudo fiscal years. For each firm, we create pseudo-year earnings using four consecutive quarters other than the...

This study examines how algorithmic trading (AT) affects forward-looking disclosures in Management Discussion and Analysis (MD&A) of annual reports. We predict and find evidence that AT relates negatively to modifications in year-over-year forward-looking MD&A disclosures. This evidence is...

Classification shifting is defined in the literature as managers' intentional classification of certain core expenses as income-decreasing special items with the intent to inflate reported core performance. We develop and validate a new measure of firms' propensity to engage in this reporting...

Our study explores how managerial stock holdings and option holdings affect CEOs' income smoothing incentives. Given the different roles of stock holdings and option holdings in solving agency problems, managers may smooth past earnings using discretionary accruals for the purpose of revealing...

This study examines whether firms with private loan contracts that contain debt covenants based on earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization (EBITDA) are more likely to misclassify core expenses as special items (i.e., classification shift). Misclassifying core expenses as...

We examine disclosures of business outlook by rank-and-file employees on Glassdoor.com. Glassdoor.com is a social media platform where employees can share their views publicly and anonymously. We find that employee disclosures are more highly associated with loan spreads in private lending...

This study tests the relation between corporate tax avoidance and disclosure of geographic earnings for U.S. multinational companies. We find that after the adoption of Statement of Financial Accounting Standards No. 131 in 1998, firms opting to discontinue disclosure of geographic earnings in...

General evidence exists to indicate that managers manage earnings at three common earnings thresholds: analyst forecasts, prior period earnings, and zero earnings. We examine one market-based motivation suggested for this behavior. If managers perceive the market penalty for barely missing an...

Research shows that analysts following companies with a higher portion of foreign operations provide more optimistic forecasts, presumably in order to maintain favorable relations with management and thereby obtain improved access to information. We examine the effect of the introduction of...