DeFond, Erkens, and Zhang (2016, hereafter DEZ) provide comprehensive analyses highlighting how random variations in propensity score matching (PSM) design choices affect inferences concerning the existence of the Big 4 auditor effect. The conclusion of DEZ is that Lawrence, Minutti-Meza, and...

This study presents a field experiment we conducted in which media articles for a random sample of firms with earnings announcements are promoted to a one percent subset of Yahoo Finance users. The promoted firms have similar fundamental and earnings-news characteristics as control firms, yet we...

We investigate whether media coverage of mega-sports events can have spill-over effects in the stock market. Specifically, we focus on the Olympics and we analyze whether the media attention and hype surrounding the Olympics encourages investors to use the Olympics as a way to classify stocks...

We investigate the effects of audit partner rotation among U.S. publicly listed firms, utilizing the fact that audit partners are periodically copied by name in public correspondence between issuers and the SEC. Relative to non-rotation firms, we find no evidence of a change in the frequency of...

More than 650 U.S. public company executives predict the stock price response to their quarterly financial reports and share their prediction after under a nondisclosure agreement. Despite having full knowledge of the reports before their release, executives’ estimates differ from realized...

Since 2001, the number of financial statement line items forecasted by analysts and managers that I/B/E/S and FactSet capture in their electronic data feeds has soared. Taking advantage of this rich new data, we find that 11 income statement and two cash flow statement analyst and management...

The paper by Gunny, Jacob, and Jorgensen provides evidence on whether the earnings volatility induced by year-end adjusting entries results from the integral method of accounting or from purposeful earnings management. The authors find that the variance and negative skewness of annual...

Software companies have steadily become key pillars of the digital economy, representing upwards of 12 percent of U.S. market capitalization. A simple buy-and-hold strategy of pure-play software companies over the past three decades produced annual alphas of over 7.1 percent. We document that...