We posit that accounting conservatism could mitigate the value destruction associated with increases in cash holdings. Consistent with this conjecture, we find that the market value of an additional dollar in cash holdings increases in accounting conservatism. This result is robust to...

We analyze whether analysts sacrifice forecast accuracy for informativeness by examining: (1) the association between analysts' deviations from management guidance and earnings management; (2) the effect of the deviations on analyst forecast accuracy; and (3) the effect of the deviations on...

Dividend payments are generally costly to shareholders. One principal reason for such payments is that they force managers to raise funds in the external capital markets to finance new projects, which presumably reduces their incentives to engage in empire-building activities. We posit that,...

This paper investigates the effect of U.S. firms' geographical location, whether urban or rural, on their corporate disclosure policies. For a comprehensive sample of U.S. firms for the years 1988 to 2004, I find that the quality of reported earnings is better for rural firms as compared to...

We bring together two streams of research: one on earnings management and the other on convertible bond arbitrage. In doing so, we bring new insights on why convertible bond hedge funds benefit from convertible bond arbitrage. Specifically, we find that firms managing their earnings prior to...

Prior studies on the relation between corporate taxes and future macroeconomic growth present contradictory evidence. We argue this mixed evidence is at least partly due to the use of statutory corporate tax rates which ignore the complexity of tax exemptions, tax deductions, tax enforcement and...