Firms sometimes obtain soft private information about growth prospects along with hard information about current or past performance. In this environment, we find that optimizing disclosures over multiple periods yields nonlinear stock price reactions following both voluntary and mandatory...

Using a sample of 188 European listed banks covering 2004 to 2016, we conduct textual analysis on banks' Pillar 3 reports and annual reports to showcase how banks formulate their regulatory reports. We first develop dictionaries relying on machine learning tools and its subfield of textual...

We study the link between measures of stock options' volatility and firms' real earnings management (RM). We hypothesize that RM causes uncertainty in the value of a firm's common stock and, as a result, increases the volatility spread and skew of the firm's options. Spread and skew proxy for...

The prior literature indicates that financial policy (e.g., payout policy) as well as accounting policy (e.g., conservatism) can be used to address incentive problems in firms but finds mixed evidence. We conjecture that stock repurchases, an increasingly popular form of payout, and conservatism...

In an economy where traders absorb information partially, we study the effect of disclosure accuracy and disclosure clarity on financial markets. Accuracy measures how precisely a disclosure identifies the firm's fundamentals, whereas clarity measures how well traders understand the disclosure....

Recent evidence suggests that investors struggle to process complex financial disclosures. Relative to equity and public debt investors, banks have unique advantages in acquiring information and can impose contractual terms to mitigate information frictions. We investigate whether financial...

I/B/E/S removes 6% of one-quarter-ahead earnings forecasts from the calculation of the consensus forecast. This study examines managers' role in these removals. We show optimistic forecasts are removed more often than pessimistic forecasts, after controlling for removal policies that I/B/E/S...

This monograph is not a review of the empirical accounting literature. This monograph tells a story and relates it to salient empirical phenomena. Why does accounting exist? Our answer is that financial accounting helps firms function efficiently. That efficiency is manifested in many ways, and...

This paper discusses the empirical literature on the economic consequences of disclosure and financial reporting regulation, drawing on U.S. and international evidence. Given the policy relevance of research on regulation, we highlight the challenges with (1) quantifying regulatory costs and...

We document time varying investor sentiment for corporate social responsibility (“CSR”) performance. We show that announcements of CSR activities generate positive abnormal returns during periods when investors place a valuation premium on CSR performance. In addition, we find that firms...