Much of the research on management compensation focuses on the level and structure of executives' pay. In this study, we examine a compensation element that has not received so far considerable research attention - the dispersion of compensation across managers - and its impact on firm...

A key question concerning socially responsible corporate activities is whether such actions achieve traditional goals, such as profit maximization and shareholder value creation, or whether such activities represent a drain on resources by opportunistic managers. Much of the debate about the...

We hypothesize that the root cause of many goodwill write-offs - managers' public admission of ill-advised corporate acquisitions - is the overpriced shares of buyers at acquisition. Overpriced shares provide managers with strong incentives to invest, and particularly to acquire businesses, even...

We examine future excess returns, earnings variability and stock volatility of Ramp;D Leaders and Followers. Drawing on the business strategy literature, which makes a clear distinction between Ramp;D Leaders and Followers, we show that Ramp;D Leaders do earn significant future excess returns,...

The immediate expensing of Ramp;D expenditures is often justified by the conservatism principle. However, no accounting procedure consistently applied can be conservative throughout the firm' life. We ask the following questions: (a) When is the expensing of Ramp;D conservative and when is it...

A paper presented at the July 2002 conference Economic Statistics: New Needs for the Twenty-First Century, cosponsored by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, the Conference on Research in Income and Wealth, and the National Association for Business Economics

This study documents an association between change in institutional ownership during a calendar quarter and abnormal returns at the time of the subsequent announcement of quarterly earnings. The result is driven by the portfolio returns of the extreme deciles of changes in institutional...

Environmental, social, and governance (“ESG”) scores have been widely touted as indicators of share price resilience during the COVID-19 humanitarian crisis. We undertake extensive analyses to investigate this claim and present robust evidence that, once the firm's industry affiliation and...

Studies comparing IFRS with U.S. GAAP generally focus on differences in the attributes and consequences of the recognized financial items. We, in contrast, focus on voluntary disclosure resulting from arguably the most significant difference between IFRS and GAAP: the capitalization of...

We reexamine the relationship between accounting conservatism and the profitability and risk of acquisitions, by comparing acquisition-related profitability and risk before and after SFAS 142 (2001). SFAS 142 eliminated the periodic amortization of goodwill, replacing it with an annual fair...