In October 1998, the SEC implemented a rule requiring firms to use plain English in their prospectus filings. In addition to the rule, the SEC encouraged the use of plain English in all filings and communication with shareholders. Did the SEC rule significantly impact managers' disclosure style?...

Over the past decade, corporate scandals have proliferated. These scandals along with the emergence of the #MeToo movement and Environmental, Social, and Corporate Governance (ESG) mandates, have increased the scrutiny of corporations’ ethics culture. How have companies responded in terms of...

Trust is both ethically important and essential for business but difficult to measure. This paper contributes toward clarifying the nature of trust in a way that is both conceptually helpful for ethical inquiries concerning business and pertinent to the measurement of trust as an element in...

A commonly-used platform to assess the tone of business documents in the extant accounting and finance literature is Diction. We argue that Diction is inappropriate for gauging the tone of financial disclosures. About 83% of the Diction optimistic words and 70% of the Diction pessimistic words...

Measuring the extent to which a firm is financially constrained is critical in assessing capital structure. Extant measures of financial constraints focus on macro firm characteristics such as age and size – variables highly correlated with other firm attributes. We parse 10-K disclosures...

The Fama and French (2015) 5-factor model is commonly used to measure the performance of stock return portfolios. Importantly, we find that three of the Fama and French (2015) firm-level characteristics (i.e., size, BV/MV, and profitability) have no significant explanatory power in the...

The 1964 Securities Acts Amendments extended disclosures mandated of NYSE firms to most firms trading in the Over-the-Counter (OTC) market. Although some prior evidence suggests substantial value increases for OTC firms due to the quot;value enhancingquot; mandated disclosures, we find no...

In business research, firm size is both ubiquitous and readily measured. In contrast, complexity, another firm-related construct, is frequently relevant, but difficult to measure and not well defined. As a result, complexity is seldom incorporated in empirical designs. Measures such as the...

Using a sample of 2,025 initial public offerings (IPOs) from 1993-1996, we examine the relation between the divergence of opinion among investors and the long-run performance of IPOs. We focus on three opening-day proxies for the uncertainty about an IPO: opening bid-ask spread, the time of...

One of the puzzles regarding initial public offerings (IPOs) is that issuers rarely get upset about leaving substantial amounts of money on the table, defined as the number of shares sold times the difference between the first-day closing market price and the offer price. The average IPO leaves...