The SEC prohibits the presentation of non-GAAP measures before corresponding GAAP measures; however, a large proportion of non-GAAP reporters present non-GAAP EPS before GAAP EPS in their earnings announcements. This noncompliance raises questions about whether firms use prominence to highlight...

We investigate whether the adoption of the Current Expected Credit Loss (CECL) standard by U.S. banks affects three properties of financial analysts’ loan loss provision forecasts: accuracy, dispersion, and coverage. We find that CECL adoption is associated with reduced accuracy and coverage,...

As of November 2016, SEC Regulation (“Reg”) AB II requires issuers of certain types of asset-backed securities (“ABS”) to disclose the credit-risk attributes of each asset in the underlying pool, a substantial expansion of prior disclosure requirements. We examine how ABS issuers’...

This paper examines the impact of mandatory loan-level disclosure on the convenience yield of AAA-rated asset-backed securities. Relying on the put-call parity relationship to estimate the daily risk-free interest rate unaffected by the convenience features of safe assets, we first show that the...

While decades of research focuses on the effectiveness of public enforcement and managers' incentives for financial misreporting, little is known about how the SEC selects targets for investigation. Using a new database of formal SEC investigations, we triangulate the determinants of SEC...

Information gathering is an instinctive response to uncertainty, but such efforts may not fully resolve the uncertainty that prompted them. This implies that proxies for investor information gathering may endogenously reflect investor uncertainty, not only before but also after information...

A dedicated investor relations (IR) function facilitates direct and ongoing dialogue between management and shareholders. This paper examines whether this form of engagement mitigates activism that relies upon support from other shareholders. We find that IR engagement is associated with...

The SEC issues comment letters about executive compensation disclosure deficiencies. Although it is not the SEC’s goal, we posit these comment letters indirectly influence compensation practices via improved disclosure. We show these letters increase pay-for-performance and relative...