We track the employment histories of over 3,000 chief executive officers (CEOs) and study how their past litigation experiences affect corporate disclosure decisions. We define litigation experience to be any securities class action experienced during a CEO’s early career in other firms and in...

I investigate the relation between business press attention and the incidence and properties of managers' voluntary disclosures. Specifically, I examine managers' disclosure responses to a bad news event: material lawsuits against the firm. I posit that managers' disclosure decisions are...

Financial restatements are costly, but frequent, events and many firms restate several times. This paper asks why rational managers engage in misreporting, in spite of the costly consequences. We present a simple extension to the Fischer and Verrecchia (2000) model, which provides testable...

In this study, I summarize the current state of executive compensation, discuss measurement and incentive issues, document recent trends in executive pay in both U.S. and international firms, and analyze the evolution of executive pay over the past century. Most recent analyses of executive...

This paper investigates firms’ decisions to resist individualized disclosure of top management compensation packages. We exploit the unique German setting, where recent legislation man-dates individualized disclosure of remuneration for members of the management board of listed corporations,...

We examine the relation between managerial incentives and disclosure. Specifically, we examine how contracts that explicitly evaluate managers relative to peer performance are associated with: (1) the transparency of mandatory disclosure; (2) the provision of voluntary disclosure; and (3) the...

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to examine the impact of corporate governance, with particular reference to the role of independent directors on boards and audit committees and media coverage on corporate transparency and disclosure. In addition, the paper also investigates the role of the...

We examine whether managers convey more information via voluntary disclosure channels when standard-setters limit managers' discretion in GAAP. We estimate the extent to which standard setters limit managers' discretion by counting the number of times obligatory modal verbs are mentioned in the...

This study investigates how the disclosure of management compensation contracts affects executive behavior by modeling a situation in which both the principal-agent relationship and market interactions are important. We find that making the disclosure of these contracts mandatory creates...