The timeliness of financial reporting has been an important topic in the accounting literature for decades. There is a tradeoff between the timeliness of reporting and the value of the information being reported. Prior to the advent of the internet, reporting had to be done using print media....

McVay (2006) shows that managers can raise reported core (pro-forma) earnings by shifting core expenses to special items. While the bulk of the literature (e.g. Teoh, Welch, and Wong, 1998; Cohen and Zarowin, 2010) has exclusively focused on accrual- and real activities-based earnings manipulation...

We investigate firms' liquidity practices around seasoned equity offerings (SEOs). We broadly classify issuers on the basis of whether the firm belongs to an industry deemed to be financially constrained or unconstrained. We find that constrained-industry issuers tend to save more cash to...

In a competitive information market, a single information source can only dominate other sources individually, not collectively. We explore whether earnings announcements constitute such a dominant source using Ball and Shivakumar's (2008) R2 metric: the proportion of the variation in annual...

The stated goals of the SEC are to protect investors, maintain orderly markets and facilitate capital formation. These goals can be achieved with very light regulation if, as assumed by traditional economic theory, investors process information costlessly and protect themselves from...

Many firms define their fiscal quarters as 13-week periods. For these firms each fiscal year contains 52 weeks, which leaves out one/two day(s) a year. To compensate, one extra week is added to every fifth/sixth year; consequently, one quarter therein comprises 14 weeks. We find evidence of...

In this paper, we begin by discussing concerns that existing reporting practices, including those used on quarterly earnings calls, underweight ESG disclosures and amplify short-term pressures on corporate management. We survey the broad market trends that are encouraging greater focus on ESG...

<p>I discuss a new intellectual paradigm, social economics and finance: the study of the social processes that shape economic thinking and behavior. This emerging field recognizes that people observe and talk to each other. A key, underexploited building block of social economics and finance is...</p>

<p>This document contains presentation slides for the American Finance Association's Presidential Address of January 4, 2020. The address is based on the paper "Social Transmission Bias in Economics and Finance."</p><p>The paper: "https://ssrn.com/abstract=3550880" https://ssrn.com/abstract=3550880...</p>

<p>I discuss a new intellectual paradigm, social economics and finance: the study of the social processes that shape economic thinking and behavior. This emerging field recognizes that people observe and talk to each other. A key, underexploited building block of social economics and finance is...</p>