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 research explores the use of control rhetoric in CEO letters between the pre and post Sarbanes Oxley periods and examines financial statement users' perception of internal controls and company performance from the CEO letter. We compare the amount of control rhetoric included in CEO letters...

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...

Even though financial reporting primarily falls within the scope of the CFO responsibilities, there is considerable evidence for the CEO's influence on corporate misreporting. Regulatory initiatives such as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 have therefore increased the CEO's responsibility in the...

We document the emergence of “social executives,” top executives who connect with investors directly, personally, and in real time through social media, and we study the consequences of this development for financial markets. We contend that the emergence of social executives enables...

This paper examines whether analysts and investors efficiently incorporate the informational cues from managerial linguistic complexity (e.g. Fog) on conference calls into their forecasts and trading decisions. We predict that managers use linguistic complexity to obfuscate before poor future...

A significant amount of earnings management (EM) research has treated managers' EM decision processes as a “black box”. The objective of this study is to begin to open the black box though examining the relative importance of economic factors as well as ethical considerations in managers' EM...

There is significant debate about the usefulness of disclosing the relative pay of the CEO and the median employee (hereafter, pay ratio), as required under the yet-to-be implemented Section 953(b) of the Dodd-Frank Act in the United States. Using an experiment, we find that disclosing...

Analyzing public and private US commercial banks, we document a discontinuity around the 10% regulatory capital ratio. This threshold separates well capitalized from adequately capitalized banks, granting benefits to banks that fall into the former category. We find that the significance and...

We investigate the effect of executives and directors with prior banking crisis experience on bank outcomes around the global financial crisis (GFC). Executives and directors with previous experience leading banks through a bank crisis may have been uniquely able to understand the risks,...