We examine whether financial reporting quality improves after firms voluntarily adopt a compensation clawback provision. Clawback provisions allow companies to recoup excess incentive pay in the event of an accounting restatement, and are intended to ex ante deter managers from publishing...

This Internet Appendix includes supplementary analyses and robustness tests. The original paper "The Financial Crisis and Corporate Credit Ratings" is available at the following URL: 'http://ssrn.com/abstract=2837376' http://ssrn.com/abstract=2837376

This Internet Appendix includes supplementary discussion and analyses. The original paper "Market (in)attention and the strategic scheduling and timing of earnings announcements" is available at the following URL: "http://ssrn.com/abstract=2545966" http://ssrn.com/abstract=2545966

We investigate whether unpleasant environmental conditions affect stock market participants' responses to information events. We draw from psychology research to develop a new prediction that weather-induced negative moods reduce market participants' activity levels. Exploiting geographic...

Fixed effects are ubiquitous in accounting and finance studies, but many new researchers have only a vague understanding of how they function. This manuscript provides plain-English explanations of how fixed effects can eliminate certain omitted variable biases, affect standard errors, and alter...

This paper illustrates how measurement error (“ME”) in dependent variables not only reduces power but, under common conditions in accounting and finance studies, can lead to statistical biases and erroneous inferences. These confounds exist because ME in accounting-based proxies is typically...

Credit ratings on many financial instruments failed to accurately portray default risk before the global financial crisis. I find no decline in the performance of corporate credit ratings during or after the crisis, indicating that the failures of ratings on financial instruments were due to...

Using comprehensive data on U.S. corporate bond trades since 2002, we find that retail bond investors over-rely on untimely credit ratings, neglect firm fundamentals, and appear to misunderstand the trade-off between bond risk and yields. Specifically, retail investors appear to select bonds by...

How do firms repair their reputations after a serious accounting restatement? To answer this question, we review firms' press releases and identify 1,765 reputation-building actions taken by: (i) 94 restating firms in the periods before and after their restatement; and (ii) a set of matched...