We examine differences in CEO achievement of EPS goals set separately through analyst forecasts and firm bonus plans. Having different goals for the same performance metric enables us to assess their relative importance in incentivizing CEOs. We find CEOs frequently achieve analyst forecasts,...

We use a proprietary data set with detailed executive compensation information to examine the relationship between the incentives of the tax director and GAAP and cash effective tax rates, the book-tax gap, and measures of tax aggressiveness. We find that the incentive compensation of the tax...

Firm-specific information can affect expected returns if it affects investor uncertainty about risk-factor loadings. We show that a stock's expected return is decreasing in factor-loading uncertainty, controlling for the average level of its factor loading. When loadings are persistent, learning...

Newly public companies tend to exhibit abnormally high accruals in the year of their initial public offering (IPO). Although the prevailing view in the literature is that these accruals are caused by opportunistic misreporting, we show that these accruals do not appear to benefit managers and...

We examine the link between corporate governance, managerial incentives, and corporate tax avoidance. Similar to other investment opportunities that involve risky expected cash flows, unresolved agency problems may lead managers to engage in more or less corporate tax avoidance than shareholders...