Consider managers evaluating their employees' performances. Should managers justify their subjective evaluations? Suppose a manager's evaluation is private information. Justifying her evaluation is costly but limits the principal's scope for distorting her evaluation of the employee. I show that...

Should principals explain and justify their evaluations? Suppose the principal's evaluation is private information, but she can provide justification by sending a costly cheap-talk message. If she does not provide justification, her message space is restricted, but the message is costless. I...

This paper analyzes the role of disclosure enforcement mechanisms (such as SEC enforcement teams and corporate governance systems) in directing the disclosure practices of managers when the information is used by shareholders to monitor the manager. The paper establishes a role for a disclosure...

How does the prospect of sale affect the seller's incentive to investigate — to acquire socially valuable information about the asset? How do the disclosure rules of contract law influence the investigation decision? Shavell (1994) showed that, if sellers and buyers are symmetrically informed,...

The authors review recent literature on the role of corporate financial reporting and transparency in reducing governance-related agency conflicts between managers, directors, shareholders, and other stakeholders—most notably financial regulators—and suggest some avenues for future research....

This study examines the impact of military connection and politically connection on Corporate Social Responsibility Disclosure. Using 110 firm year observations of Indonesia listed firms, we predict that the presence of military or politically connection in firm's board will increase the...

Investor relations officers (IROs) play a central role in corporate communications with Wall Street. We survey 610 IROs at U.S. public companies and conduct 14 follow-up interviews to deepen our understanding of the role of IROs in corporate disclosure events. Three important themes emerge from...

Evidence suggests that managers have an incentive to keep information opaque with the market when negotiating with employees who can extract above-market rents from the firm. We argue that employee ownership should mitigate this incentive to extract above-market rents and, in turn, alleviate the...

Financial economics has traditionally posited a limited role for idiosyncratic noneconomic manager-specific influences, but the strategic management literature suggests such individual influences can affect corporate outcomes. We investigate whether individual managers play an economically...

We examine whether bureaucrats with fixed salaries obtain high private returns. We digitize the financial disclosures of elite bureaucrats from India and combine this novel data with web-scraped career histories to estimate the private returns to public servants after bureaucratic reassignments....