This paper examines the relation of voluntary disclosure of management earnings forecasts and information asymmetry to insider selling through secondary equity offerings. We hypothesize that the pattern of voluntary disclosure and level of information asymmetry prior to secondary equity...

We examine the effect of voluntary adoption of clawback provisions on non-GAAP earnings disclosures. Prior literature documents that voluntary clawback adoption improves financial reporting quality by increasing the costs of misstating GAAP earnings. However, managers may respond to perceptions...

We empirically examine the effects of intensified scrutiny over non-GAAP reporting on the quality of non-GAAP earnings exclusions. We find that, on average, exclusions are of higher quality (i.e., more transitory) following intervention by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) into...

We evaluate the net costs and benefits of the whistleblower (WB) provisions adopted under the Dodd-Frank Reform Act of 2010 by examining investor responses to events related to the proposed regulations. We focus our main analysis on a sample of firms that lobbied against implementation of the WB...

We examine whether U.S. firms' M&A decisions influence the likelihood of voluntary adoption of clawback provisions in executive compensation contracts and whether clawback adoption improves subsequent M&A decisions. Because prior research finds that poor M&A decisions are associated with future...

This study provides the first systematic examination of the compensation contracting relevance of sales revenue. We document an increasing temporal trend in the explicit use of sales revenue as a performance measure in CEO annual bonus contracts, which is mirrored by a similar increase in the...

The release of the full set of financial statements in Form 10-Q provides investors with the data necessary to estimate the discretionary portion of earnings, thereby allowing them to better assess the integrity of reported quarterly earnings. We thus expect a negative association between...

We examine whether short-term financial reporting objectives related to executive compensation and employment horizons affect managers' decisions to undertake accelerated share repurchases (ASRs) versus open market repurchases (OMRs). In an ASR, the firm repurchases borrowed shares and...

Recent research shows that matching between contemporaneous revenues and expenses has declined over the past 40 years. We argue that this decline in matching reduces the contracting usefulness of earnings and affects managerial effort allocation and performance measure choice. Based on a...