Knowledge that Transforms

We examine how the partisan alignment between chief executive officers (CEOs) and the United States president influences corporate disclosure outcomes. We predict and find evidence that more partisan-aligned CEOs display greater optimism in their corporate disclosures. CEO partisan alignment is positively associated with the likelihood of issuing a management earnings forecast and issuing overly optimistic forecasts. More partisan-aligned CEOs also use a more optimistic tone in the corporate disclosure and exhibit a lower level of accounting conservatism. Our findings suggest that time-varying beliefs of CEOs formed by the political environment can shape corporate disclosures.

We examine the relation between plant-level predictive analytics use and centralization of authority for more than 25,000 manufacturing plants using proprietary US Census data. We focus on headquarters' authority over plants through delegation of decision-making and design of performance-based incentives. We find that increased predictive analytics use is associated with reduced delegation of decision-rights to local managers, increased centralization of control over data gathering and reduced plant managerial payrolls. In terms of incentives, predictive analytics use is associated with more accurate targets and tighter linkages between rewards to workers (performance-based bonuses, promotions and firings) and measured performance. Overall, our findings suggest that predictive analytics use is associated with increased centralization of authority in headquarters.

We examine whether Governmental Accounting Standards Board (GASB) financial statement disclosure alters local governments' economic decision-making. To do so, we exploit a recent GASB standard that eliminated differences in the disclosure requirements for county governments' pension obligations. The standard, GASB 68, had no effect on pension economics or the annual budget—it affected only whether and how information was presented on GASB financial statements. Using a broad hand-collected dataset, we document that counties that did not disclose information about their pension obligations before GASB 68 reduced public welfare expenditures, employment, and salary expenses relative to those that had disclosed such information. We conduct extensive field research and employ several cross-sectional analyses to conclude that the effects we document are in part driven by increased awareness of the financial costs of pension obligations by newly disclosing counties.

We examine the spillover effect of public firm disclosures on the patent trading market. The patent market is rife with information frictions, yet can potentially facilitate the reallocation of innovation to the most productive users. We find that going from the 25th percentile to the 75th percentile in public firm presence – our proxy for public firm disclosures – is linked to a 9.4% increase in other related parties’ future patent sales. The positive link between public firm presence is stronger where information asymmetry is greatest and where information uncertainty prevails relative to transactions less likely to suffer from information frictions. Tests exploiting cross-sectional variation and public firms’ EDGAR implementation corroborate the resolution of information frictions as a mechanism. Additional tests reveal financial statement disclosure as an important information source facilitating patent sales. Our results speak to an important and underexplored externality of public firm disclosures – its contribution to the patent market.

Accounting Standards Update No. 2016–02 (ASU 2016–02) generated considerable debate between managers and standard setters. We find evidence that after issuance of ASU 2016–02, lessee firms decreased their use of long-term operating leases, increased their use of short-term operating leases, and increased their use of capital expenditures. The shift from long-term operating leases to capital expenditures is more pronounced for firms that had greater reporting incentives to use operating leases prior to ASU 2016–02. However, we find no evidence that the change in leasing behavior leads to negative outcomes predicted by managers (i.e., no evidence of a decrease in reported firm performance, a decrease in firm value, increase in firm risk, decrease in credit ratings, increase in debt covenant violations, or decrease in employment). Our study adds to the literature on the real impacts of accounting standards on managers' investment behavior and economic consequences for lessee firms and their stakeholders.

This paper summarizes and discusses Cohen et al. (2023), including how their results fit into a larger set of open questions about how sustainability-oriented information gets used in capital markets. Two key messages emerge. The first is that investors are not a monolith. The second message is that the information environment in which investors have been operating has changed dramatically over the past two decades and is likely to continue to evolve for the foreseeable future. Both messages have important implications for researchers when thinking about how to design empirical tests of theoretical relationships.

We examine whether individual-level taxes affect executives' propensity to use nonpublic information in insider trades. We predict and find a positive relation between abnormal insider trading profitability and income tax rates. Using plausibly exogenous variation in state income tax rates, we estimate that the average executive uses insider trading profits to offset between 12.2% and 19.6% of the effect that income taxes have on their net compensation. We show that the sensitivity of these profits to tax rates varies predictably with the executives' compensation and shareholdings, firm monitoring effectiveness, and information asymmetry between insiders and outside investors. We also demonstrate a positive association between SEC enforcement actions and tax rates, suggesting that tax-rate-driven changes in abnormal trading profits expose insiders to legal risk. We find that insider trading volume exhibits little sensitivity to tax rates. Our findings show that income taxes affect executives’ tendency to use private information in their trades.

Intermediaries play a significant role in capital markets by reducing disclosure processing costs to market participants. Yet, due to selection and other empirical challenges, the extent and mechanisms through which intermediaries influence firm disclosure are largely unknown. To address these challenges, I conduct a field experiment that randomizes coverage of a mandatory disclosure by two key intermediaries—non-governmental organizations and the media. I show that this coverage causes noncompliant firms to publish the disclosure and firms with low-quality disclosures to improve their existing disclosures. Surprisingly, new disclosures from previously noncompliant firms are on average low quality. Survey evidence and cross-sectional tests suggest the main effect may be driven by firms perceiving pressure from the regulator, whose processing costs may have been reduced. My results yield causal estimates of the effect of intermediary coverage on disclosure and shed light on the nature of the stakeholders that subsequently exert costs on firms.

We examine the determinants and market consequences associated with earnings announcements going viral on social media, a phenomenon we label “earnings virality.” Using a comprehensive panel of historical Twitter data, we find that the typical earnings announcement receives relatively little social media coverage, but others go viral on social media, quickly reaching the feeds of millions of people. We find that viral earnings announcements generally have Twitter content that is more extreme in tone and contains less unique content. Further, earnings virality is positively associated with revenue surprises, investor recognition, retail investor ownership, and retail investor trading around the announcement. Earnings virality appears to be detrimental to markets, as it coincides with lower market liquidity and slower price formation. Overall, our evidence suggests that user-driven dissemination through social media platforms, when amplified and taken to extreme levels, may be harmful to markets.

We find that the staggered passage of state-level laws that legalize marijuana for medical use increases states' borrowing costs by 7–9 basis points. Consistent with economic theory on substance use suggesting that marijuana legalization increases local consumption of the drug (by expanding its availability and reducing its perceived risks), we predict and find that increased consumption represents an important mechanism that explains the higher state bond spreads. We also show that following such laws’ passage, states incur higher marijuana-consumption-related expenditures, including for police, corrections, and public welfare.