Section 1 reports findings regarding the expense and revenue management requests that sales leaders are asked to implement. Through a 2012 Strategic Account Management Association (SAMA) survey, we find that customers and strategic accounts are often shielded from these myopic forms of...

We surveyed 1,638 sales executives across 40 countries regarding their companies' likelihood of asking sales to perform real earnings management (REM) actions when earnings pressure exists. Using this information, which we refer to as companies' REM propensities, we study how company...

Prior research hypothesizes managers use ‘real actions,’ including the reduction of discretionary expenditures, to manage earnings to meet or beat key benchmarks. This paper examines this hypothesis by testing how different types of marketing expenditures are used to boost earnings for a...

We examine the performance of buy-side analysts relative to that of the sell-side. Our tests show that buy-side analysts at a large investment firm make less optimistic stock recommendations than sell-side analysts, consistent with their facing fewer conflicts of interest. However, their...

The study reported here is a comparison of the earnings-forecasting performance of analysts at a large buy-side firm with the performance of sell-side analysts in the 1997-2004 period. The tests show that the buy-side analysts made more optimistic and less accurate forecasts than their...

We develop an analytical framework that divides the contribution of pension risk to the total systematic risk of the firm into two parts: (1) the risk due to the investment strategy of the pension plan (“Mismatch Risk”); and (2) the risk due to the funded status of the pension plan...

Prior research hypothesizes managers strategically time retail price promotions to manage reported earnings. However, the reaction of competitors to such real earnings management behavior is less well studied. Consistent with the prior research, I show evidence that firms use fiscal quarter-end...