The disclosure literature has studied proprietary costs by focusing on the disclosing firms and their disclosure decisions, while offering limited insights into peer companies' copycatting behavior. In this paper, we examine whether copycats profit from imitating peer companies, the sources of...

Using a regulation that increased portfolio disclosure frequency of US mutual funds as an exogenous shock shortening funds’ investment horizon, we find that affected funds influence portfolio firms to reduce the pay duration of their executives to incentivize them to also have shorter...

The relation between product-market competition and voluntary corporate disclosure is fundamental, but empirical evidence of this relation has been mixed. One reason for the mixed evidence could be that both competition and disclosure are multidimensional. In this study we introduce a...

Asset growth has been shown to be negatively associated with future returns. Cooper, Gulen, and Schill (2008. Asset Growth and the Cross-Section of Stock Returns. Journal of Finance) argue that an aggregation of all asset growth components as total asset (TA) growth leads to the strongest...

We examine an emerging phenomenon that talented employees leave successful entrepreneurial firms to join less mature ones. Using a unique person-level dataset and a comprehensive sample of private firms from the U.S. Census Bureau, we find that these “entrepreneurial diffusers”, by...

This paper analyzes how corporate disclosure has been reshaped by machine processors, employed by algorithmic traders, robot investment advisors, and quantitative analysts. Our findings indicate that increasing machine and AI readership, proxied by machine downloads, motivates firms to prepare...

Litigation poses a significant business risk for auditors. We argue that auditors learn from other auditors' litigation events and examine the consequences of such events for future accounting misstatements. Using a hand-collected sample of auditor litigation events, we find a significant...

This paper provides first evidence of negative peer disclosure (NPD), an emerging corporate strategy to publicize adverse news about industry peers on social media. Consistent with NPDs being implicit positive self-disclosures, disclosing firms experience a two-day abnormal return of 1.6-1.7%...

Growing AI readership, proxied by expected machine downloads, motivates firms to prepare filings that are friendlier to machine parsing and processing. Firms avoid words that are perceived as negative by computational algorithms, as compared to those deemed negative only by dictionaries meant...

Asymmetric information is a fundamental friction that results in mismatches and efficiency losses in the labor market. In this study, we posit that more disaggregated financial disclosure by a CEO candidate’s prior employer can help the hiring firm better assess the possible fit between its...