We examine the association between CEO reputation (proxied by the extent of press coverage) and the quality of the firm's earnings (proxied by two accruals-based measures). We test three explanations for an association between these constructs: the efficient contracting hypothesis suggests that...

We survey 401 financial executives, and conduct in-depth interviews with an additional 20, to determine the key factors that drive decisions related to reported earnings and voluntary disclosure. The majority of firms view earnings, especially EPS, as the key metric for outsiders, even more so...

We investigate Beaver's (2002) conjecture that the accruals anomaly is a manifestation of the glamour stock phenomenon documented in the finance literature. Value (glamour) stocks, characterized by low (high) past sales growth, high (low) B/M, high (low) E/P and high (low) C/P, are known to earn...

Although leading indicators are becoming increasingly important for equity valuation, disclosures of such indicators suffer from the absence of GAAP related guidance on content and presentation. We explicitly examine (i) whether one leading indicator - order backlog - predicts future earnings,...

We examine whether executive stock options (ESOs) provide managers with incentives to invest in risky projects. For a sample of oil and gas producers, we examine whether the coefficient of variation of future cash flows from exploration activity (our proxy for exploration risk) increases with...

Articles in the financial press suggest that institutional investors are overly focused on current profitability. This suggests that as institutional ownership increases, stock prices will reflect less current period information that is predictive of future period earnings. On the other hand,...

One of the important limitations of the SRISK measure of systemic risk, proposed by Brownlees and Engle and Acharya, Engle and Richardson, is its reliance on stock market data without much validation against the institutions' fundamentals based on its financial statements. We propose a financial...

Corporate executives have long decried the undue emphasis on short-termism - defined as maximizing corporate profits in the next quarter. Instead, most corporate executives say that they want to make corporate investments from a long-term perspective - defined as enhancing corporate value over a...

We investigate the effectiveness of regulatory oversight exercised by the SEC against auditors over the years 1996-2009. The evidence suggests that the SEC is significantly less likely to name a Big N auditor as a defendant, after controlling for both the severity of the violation and for the...

We examine the cost-effectiveness, from the shareholders' perspective, of the accounting standards issued by the FASB during 1973-2009. In particular, we evaluate (i) the stock market reactions of firms affected by the standards surrounding events that changed the probability of issuance of...