ABSTRACT This study investigates a communication game between a CEO and a board of directors where the CEO's career concerns can potentially impede value‐increasing informative communication. By adopting a policy of aggressive boards (excessive replacement), shareholders can facilitate communication between the CEO and the board. The results are in contrast to the multitude of models which generally find that management‐friendly boards improve communication, and help to explain empirical results concerning CEO turnover. The results also provide the following novel predictions concerning variation in CEO turnover: (1) there is greater CEO turnover in firms or industries where CEO performance is relatively more difficult to assess; (2) the board is more aggressive in their replacement of the CEO in industries or firms where the board's advisory role is more salient; and (3) there is comparatively less CEO turnover in firms or industries where the variance of CEO talent is high.

ABSTRACT This study investigates the real effects of management communication, specifically of forecasts or earnings guidance , on investment. Managers can signal the strength of their projects through accuracy in their earnings guidance. This leads less accurate managers to distort their investments; the equilibrium investment strategy involves over‐investment when earnings exceed the forecast and under‐investment when earnings fall short. Moreover, we find that managers are pessimistic in their forecasts, which helps to explain the corresponding well‐documented empirical regularity. This downward bias increases the likelihood of investment manipulation but decreases the real loss from distortion. Interestingly, the over‐investment induced by earnings guidance helps to mitigate the classic under‐investment problem for a myopic manager with unobservable investment. Earnings guidance can therefore be value‐increasing when managerial myopia is severe.

We study informational freeriding in a model where agents privately acquire information and then decide when to reveal it by taking an action. Examples of such freeriding are prevalent in financial markets, e.g., the timing of initial public offerings, analysts’ forecasts, and mutual funds’ investment decisions. The main results show that, in large populations, few agents provide significant information while the vast majority of agents freeride. We highlight the role of uncertainty and market size in shaping the dynamics of price discovery. Among other results, we find that heightened uncertainty over the underlying state enhances information production, yet weakens the precision and speed of information aggregation in the market.