This paper examines whether managers strategically time their earnings forecasts (MEFs) as litigation risk increases. We find as litigation risk increases, the propensity to release a delayed forecast until after the market is closed (AMC) or a Friday decreases but not proportionally more for...

This study develops a theory that predicts the lower the degree to which firms' earnings are correlated with the industry the greater the probability a firm will issue a biased signal of firm performance. The theory provides for causal predictions in our empirical tests in which we examine the...

Academics and practitioners frequently highlight that overall market and industry performance is an important aspect of a firm's profitability. However, few studies allow for the decomposition of a firm's profitability into market, industry, and idiosyncratic components, and those that do often...

This study develops a theory that predicts the lower the degree to which firms' earnings are correlated with the industry the greater the probability a firm will issue a biased signal of firm performance. The theory provides for causal predictions in our empirical tests in which we examine the...

We examine the hierarchy of earnings benchmarks in Australia. Our results demonstrate a disconnect between the actions managers appear to take, and the market reaction to firms exceeding or just missing earnings benchmarks. The actions of managers appear consistent with them acting in a manner...

Early work documents a sensitivity of CEO compensation contracts to economic factors beyond the control of the CEO, where CEO incentive payouts are increasing in performance attributable to good luck and decreasing in bad luck (referred to as “pay-for-luck”). Using established measures of...

We revisit the asymmetric timeliness of earnings as proposed by Basu (1997). For a large sample of US firm years from 1970-2019, we show that earnings are asymmetrically timely with respect to bad economic news, and that this is robust to the declining timeliness of good news, different time...

We study how investor sentiment a ects the speed with which prices reflect information. Price discovery is more timely for firms with greater sensitivity to sentiment, as measured by a sentiment beta. Our research improves our understanding of the price formation process when sentiment is not...

This study investigates the effect on stock return volatility of a significant event in the life of a firm, a change in its Chief Executive Officer (CEO). Citing weaknesses in the prior literature, we bring a new approach to re-examine the issue. Firstly, we use a relatively unbiased...

We empirically examine the associations between the cost of capital and the timeliness of analysts' earnings forecasts, as a proxy for disclosure precision. We document that as the precision of the information increases so does the cost of capital, consistent with prior research showing more...