This article is based on the keynote address from the Eastern Finance Association meeting in South Beach in April 2010. In this keynote address, I discuss how to engage and motivate students by using the results from surveys of corporate finance professionals. Specific examples are given to...

We administer psychometric tests to senior executives to obtain evidence on their underlying psychological traits and attitudes. We find U.S. CEOs differ significantly from non-U.S. CEOs in terms of their underlying attitudes. In addition, we find that CEOs are significantly more optimistic and...

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...

Financial reports present assets, liabilities, and earnings on a nominal basis (unadjusted for inflation). Using a novel dataset of nearly a century of financial reports, this paper examines whether and how inflation affects the relation between accounting earnings and stock market value, i.e.,...