In addition to being a function of traditional fundamentals such as cash-flow persistence and the discount rate, the equilibrium association between a security price and a value-relevant statistic can simply be a function of what rational investors believe the association will be. We refer to...

We decompose quantitative management earnings forecasts into macroeconomic and firm-specific components to determine the extent to which voluntary disclosure provided by management has macroeconomic information content. We provide evidence that the forecasts of bellwether firms, which are...

We analyze the effect of external financing concerns on managers' financial reporting behavior prior to management buyouts (MBOs). Prior studies hypothesize that managers intending to undertake an MBO have an incentive to manage earnings downward to reduce the purchase price. We hypothesize that...

Research in sociology and ethics suggests that individuals adhere to social norms of behavior established by their peers. Within an agency framework, we model endogenous social norms by assuming each agent's cost of implementing an action depends on the social norm for that action, defined to be...