We examine the impact of financial disclosures’ readability on future shareholder activism, as expressed by shareholder-initiated proxy proposals. Based on a sample of 1,560 proposals made by shareholders of 818 S& P 1500 firms between 2000 and 2014, we find that the semantic complexity of the...

In their joint framework project, the FASB and the IASB recently proposed dropping stewardship as a separate objective of financial accounting, because the Boards view stewardship and valuation usefulness as compatible sub-objectives ranking under an overall objective of decision usefulness....

Ideally, firms should discontinue projects that become unprofitable. Managers, however, continue to operate such projects because of their limited employment horizons and empire-building motivations (Jensen, 1986; Ball, 2001). Prior studies suggest that timely loss recognition in accounting earnings...

In their joint framework project, the FASB and the IASB recently proposed dropping stewardship as a separate objective of financial accounting, because the Boards view stewardship and valuation usefulness as compatible sub-objectives ranking under an overall objective of decision usefulness....

In response to the recent debate on the media, this paper examines the effect of media coverage on firm earnings management. Even if prior studies (Miller 2006; Dyck et al. 2010) have documented the media's role in detecting and deterring accounting fraud (or extreme earnings management), it is...

In this paper, we evaluate the effect of managerial entrenchment on corporate information production using the voting outcomes of shareholder-initiated proposals intended to mitigate managerial entrenchment. We focus on the proposals that are passed or rejected by a small margin of votes, which...

This paper studies the role of voluntary disclosure in crowding out independent research about firm value. In the model, when inside firm owners make it easier for outside investors to obtain inexpensive biased information from the manager, then investors rely less on costly unbiased research....

Prior literature shows that financial disclosures and corporate governance both impact firm performance. This paper documents an important topic that has been overlooked in the prior literature, their joint effect, because the two mechanisms could be independent, substitutive, or complementary...

We investigate how the interaction between product market competition and firm-level corporate governance enhances the accuracy of analysts' forecasts and reduces the forecasts' deviation. Using a sample of Brazilian public firms covered by analysts, we find that competitive industries provide...

A large proportion of acquisitions results in shareholder wealth destruction. This study examines who is responsible for allowing bad acquisitions. Using a sample of 349 tax-free, stock-for-stock, pooling acquisitions over 1993-2001, the announcement period abnormal returns of acquirers are...