Managers have sufficient discretion under Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP) to adopt more or less conservative financial reporting policies. In this paper, we develop a signaling model to provide insight into managers' decisions to be conservative in their accounting. We provide...

Because investors and creditors often compare the financial statements of similar or competing firms when deciding how to allocate their funds, it is likely that a firm's financial well-being depends on how well it performs relative to its rivals. In this paper, we consider the problem of...

Some aspects of a firm's financial well-being depend on how it compares to similar firms. This suggests that accounting, financing and production choices that alter a firm's comparisons through their effects on the firm's financial statements will depend on the choices of similar firms: that is,...

The purpose of this paper is to examine how public information systems (e.g., firm's accounting systems) affect investors' decisions to acquire and trade on private information about the value of a firm. We develop a model of a stock exchange in which competitive specialist/dealers set prices...

Two–way communication via social media platforms allows the firm to make an initial disclosure decision and then revise it after observing the response on social media to its initial decision. We examine the pressures interactive communications place on disclosure choices and find that...

We study the way in which SEC restrictions on fund manager compensation affect portfolio choice when investors buy into funds whose recent performance has been good. We find that fund managers choose riskier portfolios than they would if there were no contracting restrictions and that these...

When do wholesalers issue green bonds to finance their socially responsible activities instead of charging a premium for the products they produce? We show that in less competitive retail markets when retailers can "skim" more of the premium that end consumers pay for socially responsible...

We study a firm's decisions to engage in socially responsible activities, voluntarily report on them and purchase external assurance of the report. In our signaling model, neither firm type nor the level of activity is observed. We show that if voluntary assurance is not too expensive, the firm...

Analysts' forecasts of revenue and how they compare to reported revenues is now a standard part of financial analysis surrounding earnings releases for internet firms. In this paper, we examine the characteristics and relative information content of revenue and earnings news for such firms...

In this paper, we compare First Call analyst forecasts to unofficial forecasts of quarterly earnings per share commonly referred to as whisper forecasts. Our analysis yields the following results. First, we find that whispers are, on average, more accurate than First Call forecasts and are...