There is significant debate about the usefulness of disclosing the relative pay of the CEO and the median employee (hereafter, pay ratio), as required under the yet-to-be implemented Section 953(b) of the Dodd-Frank Act in the United States. Using an experiment, we find that disclosing...

Using the mandatory adoption of International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS), we examine whether an exogenously imposed disclosure reform that increases the amount of information affects the level of executive compensation. Extant theories suggest that disclosure reforms could either raise...

This study addresses concerns from the SEC and examines the trend of shareholder activism and its impact on financial players. Motivated by prior research that finds female CEOs are more likely to be targeted by shareholder activism, we examine how the nature of shareholder activism...

This study investigates whether the governance attributes of Brazilian companies are associated with voluntary executive stock option (ESO) disclosure. Results show that Brazilian companies voluntarily disclose very little about their ESO plans, and that board size, presence of a compensation...

Using text-based analysis of 10-K MD&A disclosures, we find that fraudulent firms produce verbal disclosure that is abnormal relative to strong counterfactuals. This abnormal text predicts fraud out of sample, has a verbal factor structure, and can be interpreted to reveal likely mechanisms that...

We use highly granular computational linguistics to assess the MD&A section of the 10-K as a whole. Our results show that the content of MD&A can be systematically used to explain the valuation of firms, particularly those undergoing business change, where the value relevance of financial...

In this paper, we examine the impact of corporate governance mechanisms on the quality of operational risk disclosures provided in the annual reports and risk reports in a representative sample of 63 publicly listed European banks for the fiscal years 2008 and 2009. We find that banks having a...