This paper explores a puzzling historical trend in US-listed firms: Between 1950 and 2018, firm-specific stock price crashes rose from 5.5% to an astonishing 27%. Most of the literature attributes such crashes to agency reasons, i.e., executives camouflaging bad news via financial reporting...

We find that powerful chief executive officers (CEOs) are associated with higher crash risk. The positive association between CEO power and crash risk holds when controlling for earnings management, tax avoidance, chief executive officer's option incentives, and CEO overconfidence. Firms with...

Using a large sample of U.S. public firms, we find robust evidence that short interest is positively related to one-year ahead stock price crash risk. The evidence is consistent with the view that short sellers are able to ferret out bad news hoarding by managers. Additional findings show that...

We examine the implication of executive gender on asset prices. Using a large sample of US public firms during 2006--2015, we find a negative association between female CFOs and future stock price crash risk. However, the impact of female CEOs on crash risk is not statistically significant. The...

We investigate whether generalist chief executive officers (CEOs) who gain transferable skills across firms and industries have less incentive to hoard bad news. To address endogeneity concerns stemming from firm-CEO matching, we deploy a difference-in-differences method utilizing exogenous CEO...

Using a large sample of U.S. public firms, we find robust evidence that short interest is positively related to one-year ahead stock price crash risk. The evidence is consistent with the view that short sellers are able to detect bad news hoarding by managers. Additional findings show that the...

In the aftermath of the 2007-2008 financial crisis, flawed variable pay structures of executives were blamed by many for contributing to the build-up of the global financial turmoil, as they allegedly incentivized them to engage in excessive risk-taking. Legislators around the globe decided to...

The questions of whether there ever existed excessive risk-taking incentives from executive compensation in the financial industry, and whether top executives of financial services firms actually responded to such excessive incentives that eventually led to the crisis remain unanswered. The...

Using a large sample of U.S. firms for the period 1993-2009, we provide evidence that the sensitivity of a chief financial officer's (CFO) option portfolio value to stock price is significantly and positively related to the firm's future stock price crash risk. In contrast, we find only weak...