We describe the process through which the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) makes filings “publicly available.” For a sample of Form 4 (insider trade) filings, we show that, during the period we examine, the majority of filings are available to paying subscribers of the SEC's public...

We investigate executive employment gaps (hereafter, gaps) between the appointment of an external CEO at a public firm and the individual's prior executive position at a public company. These gaps cannot be reliably obtained from common databases. We hand‐collect data for externally hired CEOs...

We examine the relation between disclosure tone and shareholder litigation to determine whether managers’ use of optimistic language increases litigation risk. Using both general-purpose and context-specific text dictionaries to quantify tone, we find that plaintiffs target more optimistic...

Short-term earnings news is monitored by a wide variety of firm constituents; however, our understanding of the forces that facilitate or limit the speed of earnings anticipation is limited. I create a measure of speed – inspired by the price discovery literature – that captures how quickly...

Prior work suggests that greater earnings disaggregation in financial statements leads to favorable market outcomes. This perspective is based on a fundamental presumption that the disaggregation separates earnings components with heterogeneous characteristics. We hypothesize that the...