This paper examines whether bond market participants alter their credit risk assessments of firms that appoint the corporate general counsel (GC) to senior management. GCs may place less emphasis on their gatekeeping responsibilities upon appointment to senior management, thus potentially resulting in increased firm credit risk. Using changes in firm-level credit ratings and credit default swap spreads to proxy for changes in credit risk, we find a positive association between GC promotions to senior management and increases in firm credit risk. Additionally, the increased personal liability for GCs under the Sarbanes–Oxley Act only partially mitigates this association.

We study the role of CFO narcissism in the intent and ability to positively influence sell-side analysts’ perceptions of the firm. Consistent with narcissists casting favorable impressions on others, we find CFO narcissism is associated with overly optimistic analyst valuations. We then study public persuasion attempts by analyzing conference call transcripts and private persuasion attempts through a laboratory study. In the conference call setting, we show that narcissistic CFOs use more persuasive language and are more inclined to call on bearish analysts, both of which we link to price target revisions following the call. In the lab study, we simulate a one-on-one conversation and find that narcissists are especially more likely to use coercive methods to induce higher valuations from analysts. Collectively, we show that narcissistic CFOs use persuasion to favorably influence analysts’ perceptions of firm value.

We show analysts’ own earnings forecasts predict error in their own forecasts of earnings at other horizons, which we argue provides a measure of the extent to which analysts inefficiently use information. We construct our measure by exploiting two sources of variation in analysts’ incentives: (i) more recent forecasts have greater salience at the time of the earnings release so accuracy incentives are higher (lower) at shorter (longer) forecast horizons and (ii) analysts have greater incentives for optimism (pessimism) at longer (shorter) horizons. Consistent with these incentives affecting the incorporation of information into forecasts, we document (i) current year forecasts underweight (overweight) information in shorter (longer) horizon forecasts and (ii) the mis-weighting is more pronounced when recent news is negative—when analysts have greater (weaker) incentives to incorporate the news into shorter (longer) horizon forecasts. Finally, returns tests suggest that forecasts adjusted for the inefficiency we document better represent market expectations of earnings.

We examine whether dividends serve as substitutes or complements to accounting information in firm valuation. Consistent with dividends substituting for earnings information, we find that dividend paying firms have 11%–15% lower earnings response coefficients (ERCs) than non-payers. We find more substitution when the dividend provides a stronger signal of permanent earnings: when the firm is less likely to cut the dividend, when the firm is likely to fund the dividend out of earnings rather than cash reserves, or when the dividend is larger. We then show that dividend payers have lower absolute returns, less trading volume, and fewer analyst forecasts at the earnings announcement (EA), suggesting that dividend payers attract less attention to their less informative EAs. Finally, we show that the lower EA attention translates into less earnings management and fewer earnings-related disclosures for dividend payers relative to non-payers. Collectively, this evidence suggests that dividends supply information about permanent earnings and, although costly, could be an efficient way for some firms to satisfy investors’ demand for earnings information.

ABSTRACT We investigate the effect of CFO narcissism, as measured by signature size, on financial reporting quality. Experimentally, we validate that narcissism predicts misreporting behavior, and that signature size predicts misreporting through its association with narcissism. Empirically, we examine notarized CFO signatures and find CFO narcissism is associated with more earnings management, less timely loss recognition, weaker internal control quality, and a higher probability of restatements. The results are consistent for within‐firm comparisons focusing on CFO changes and are robust to controlling for CFO overconfidence and CEO narcissism. The results highlight the importance of CFO characteristics in the domain of financial reporting decisions.

Yes. We show that dividend changes contain information about highly persistent changes in future economic income. Three methodological differences lead us to different conclusions from the extant literature: (i) we use an “event window approach” to cleanly delineate earnings after dividend changes from those before, (ii) we use alternative earnings measures to control for endogenous investment and asset write-downs surrounding dividend changes, and (iii) we control for the nonlinear relation between dividend changes and market reactions. Our results suggest dividend announcement returns reflect information about the level of permanent earnings, though the timing of the information content is difficult to reconcile with traditional signaling models.

ABSTRACT Analysts are selective about which forecasts they update and, thus, convey information about current quarter earnings even when not revising the current quarter earnings (CQE) forecast. We find that (1) textual statements, (2) share price target revisions, and (3) future quarter earnings forecast revisions all predict error in the CQE forecast. We document several reasons analysts sometimes omit information from the CQE forecast: to facilitate beatable forecasts by suppressing positive news from the CQE forecast, to herd toward the consensus, and to avoid small forecast revisions. We also show that omitting information from CQE forecasts leads to lower forecast dispersion and predictable returns at the earnings announcement.

ABSTRACT Firms face a greater risk of lawsuits for overstated rather than understated earnings or net assets, suggesting conservatism can reduce firms' expected legal costs. Because managers with legal expertise are more likely than other managers to recognize the legal benefits of conservatism, this study examines whether legal expertise among members of senior management promotes greater conservatism. Consistent with this prediction, we find that firms with a general counsel (GC) in senior management (our proxy for legal expertise) report more conservatively. We also find that GC firms recalibrate their conservatism levels in response to changes in the legal environment—their conservatism choices are more responsive to litigation against peer firms and to two judicial rulings that affected the litigation risk for firms located in the Ninth Circuit. Overall, our findings suggest that populating senior management with legal experts affects the extent to which a firm's level of conservatism incorporates legal risks. Data Availability: Data are available from public sources identified in the text. JEL Classifications: K40; M41.