This paper conducts surveys that document CFO perspectives on corporate planning, corporate investment, capital structure, payout, and the goal of the firm. Current policy choices are compared to CFO survey data from two decades prior, which allows me to identify decision-making themes that are...

An employee's annual earnings fall by 13% the year her firm files for bankruptcy, and the present value of lost earnings from bankruptcy to six years following bankruptcy is 87% of pre-bankruptcy annual earnings. More worker earnings are lost in thin labor markets and among small firms. Ex ante...

We conduct beauty contest experiments, using close to 2,000 subjects to study the facial traits of CEOs. In one experiment we use pairs of photographs and find that subjects rate CEO faces as appearing more "competent" and less "likable" than non-CEO faces. Another experiment matches CEOs from...

Campbell, Lettau, Malkiel, and Xu (2001) document a positive trend in idiosyncratic volatility during the 1962-1997 period. We show that by 2003 volatility falls back to pre-1990s levels. Furthermore, we show that the increase and subsequent reversal is concentrated among firms with low stock...

This paper comprehensively reviews Accounting for Income Taxes (AFIT). The first half provides background and a primer on AFIT. The second half reviews existing studies in detail and offers suggestions for future research. We emphasize the research questions that have been addressed (most of...

This paper quantifies the “human costs of bankruptcy” by estimating employee wage losses induced by the bankruptcy filing of employers using employee-employer matched data from the U.S. Census Bureau's LEHD program. We find that employee wages begin to deteriorate one year prior to...

The final working paper version: 'http://ssrn.com/abstract=2103384' http://ssrn.com/abstract=2103384.Presentation slides: "http://ssrn.com/abstract=2347428" http://ssrn.com/abstract=2347428.We provide insights into earnings quality from a survey of 169 CFOs of public companies and in-depth...

Do firms issue stock when prices seem irrationally high? Do they invest or save the proceeds from the sale of overvalued stocks? Is value created or destroyed in the process? This paper uses a novel identification strategy to tackle these questions. We examine the capital investment, stock...

The comprehensive survey reported here allowed analysis of how senior U.S. financial executives make decisions related to performance measurement and voluntary disclosure. Chief financial officers were asked what earnings benchmarks they cared about and which factors motivated executives to...

We find that employee stock option deductions lead to large aggregate tax savings for Nasdaq 100 and Samp;P 100 firms and also affect corporate marginal tax rates. For Nasdaq firms, including the effect of options reduces the estimated median marginal tax rate from 31% to 5%. For Samp;P firms,...