Knowledge that Transforms

ABSTRACT We investigate investors' voluntary disclosure decisions under uncertainty about their information endowment. In our model, an investor may receive initial evidence about a target firm. Conditional on learning the initial evidence, the investor may receive additional evidence that helps them interpret the initial evidence. The investor takes a position in the firm's stock, then voluntarily discloses some or all of their findings, and finally closes their position after the disclosure. We present two main findings. First, the investor will always disclose the initial evidence, even though the market is uncertain about whether the investor possesses such evidence. Second, the investor's disclosure strategy of the additional evidence increases stock price volatility: they disclose extreme news and withhold moderate news. Due to the withholding of the additional evidence, misleading disclosure arises as an equilibrium outcome, where the investor's report decreases (increases) price despite their news being good (bad). These results remain robust when considering the target firm's endogenous response to the investor's report.

ABSTRACT This paper examines the association between CEOs' prosocial tendency and their firms' likelihood of accounting manipulation. We measure CEOs' prosocial tendency based on their involvement with charitable organizations. We find that prosocial CEOs are less likely to engage in accounting manipulation, as proxied by material non‐reliance restatements and SEC or US Department of Justice enforcement actions. The effect is more pronounced when CEOs are involved with charities that directly aim to improve the welfare of others and when they face stronger incentives to misreport. These results continue to hold in analyses of changes in CEOs' prosocial tendency around turnover events. Taken together, our findings suggest that CEOs' prosocial tendency, a fundamental personal trait, plays a significant role in shaping the quality of accounting information.

ABSTRACT This paper examines private meetings between company managers and institutional investors as part of the broader financial reporting environment. Using direct observations of 39 such meetings across four large, listed companies—complemented with the study of preparatory work and internal documents—the paper investigates how these meetings help build and maintain relationships between companies and investors. The analysis shows that the importance of these meetings lies not primarily in the exchange of new information but in the creation of familiarity, focused engagement, and exclusivity, which strengthen social ties and reinforce participants' positions in the capital market. Drawing on interaction ritual theory, the paper identifies three forms of ritual work through which these outcomes are produced: assembly work, conversational work, and bodily work. The study contributes to research on the social embeddedness of capital markets and suggests that private reporting meetings should be understood not only as informational events but also as relational mechanisms that shape access, trust, and network persistence.

ABSTRACT Research has long recognized that institutional investors possess significant information processing advantages. Yet even these investors face limited‐attention constraints, implying that periods of distraction may attenuate their advantage. We examine the effects of a plausibly exogenous shock to institutional attention arising from the annual buy‐side‐focused Equity Research and Valuation (ERV) conference for Chartered Financial Analysts on institutions' information processing at earnings announcements. Validation tests using conference call data indicate that fewer buy‐side analysts are present on earnings calls during ERV conferences and that questions are shorter, consistent with the presence of substitute or backup analysts. In our main analyses, we find that buy‐side analyst inattention reduces information asymmetry among investors and improves liquidity at these earnings announcements, consistent with theory, and observe similar results for non–earnings announcement events. In additional tests, we document slower price formation, but also more profitable retail trading, during these periods. Collectively, we provide novel evidence on the market consequences of institutional inattention during key information events.

ABSTRACT This study examines whether competition in the form of emerging threats from rivals' overlapping product strategies has explanatory power for future performance and volatility, beyond existing competition measures and firm life cycle proxies. We proxy for emerging threats using product market fluidity, which captures competitive pressures and instability arising from rivals' evolving product overlap. Specifically, higher fluidity (i.e., higher product market threats) is negatively associated with future profitability and operating cash flows and positively associated with the variability of future profitability and operating cash flows. We also find fluidity is negatively associated with future asset turnover, margins, and expenses, and only moderately positively associated with future sales, shedding light on the mechanisms through which product market threats manifest in future performance. However, capital market participants do not fully incorporate this information, leading to predictable future stock returns and analyst forecast errors. Overall, our findings suggest that the dynamism and fluidity in a firm's product market space convey valuable and distinct information to capital market participants.

ABSTRACT I use downloads of regulatory filings by SEC employees as a measure of SEC attention and find that SEC employees are disproportionately less likely to review the filings of firms with names later in the alphabet. Additional tests show that alphabetical order determines a firm's priority when the SEC follows up on common shocks among peer firms and that the strength of the SEC's alphabetical bias does not vary with the intensity of resource constraints. Further, the SEC appears to be more surprised by the restatements of end‐of‐the‐alphabet firms. These results are consistent with a cognitive bias that leads SEC employees to pay more attention to firms at the top of alphabetically sorted lists. Last, using shocks to alphabetical order caused by firm name changes, I find that alphabetically induced increases in SEC attention are linked with lower future noncompliance, suggesting that the regulatory effects of alphabetical order are material. Overall, this study highlights the “human” element of regulatory attention.

ABSTRACT We use theory from identity economics, which synthesizes research characterizing how personal identity shapes decisions in domains such as education and career selection, to predict that the process by which people sort into accounting careers produces a population of accountants with a distinctive set of values. Specifically, we hypothesize that two kinds of personal values, called conservation values and self‐enhancement values, are overrepresented among accountants because they are associated with the decision to work as an accountant. Using data from 38 countries in the European Social Survey, we find support for both hypotheses. Given this evidence that accountants' values prioritize stability over change and concern for self over concern for others, we further hypothesize that, motivated by these values, accountants will be relatively skeptical about contemporary targets of social reforms, including those pursued by prominent accounting organizations. We test this prediction using attitudes about climate change and tolerance for minorities and find support for it. Based on our findings, we derive recommendations for an effective design of social reforms in the accounting profession. Our findings are relevant for accounting elites tasked with leading the profession into a dynamic future and contribute to the new and growing literature on accounting's human capital.

Abstract Accounting Standards Update (ASU) 2016‐01 requires that unrealized gains and losses on equity investments (equity‐URGL) previously recognized in other comprehensive income now be included in net income. Using a sample of public insurers, we examine how this accounting standard change influences managerial investment decisions, with a particular focus on the moderating effects of compensation contracting and financial reporting practices. We find that prior to ASU 2016‐01, equity‐URGL was positively associated with CEO compensation, but this association dissipates in the post‐adoption period, when equity‐URGL is more frequently excluded from CEO performance metrics. Despite purported concerns about increased earnings volatility due to the new reporting requirements, highly affected insurers do not significantly reduce the size or risk of their equity investment portfolios following ASU 2016‐01, particularly when compensation metrics exclude equity‐URGL. We also find that equity‐URGL is more frequently excluded from non‐GAAP earnings post‐adoption, suggesting that managers adjust financial reporting practices as a response to the change. Moreover, highly affected insurers maintain the size and risk of their equity portfolios when equity‐URGL is excluded from non‐GAAP earnings. These findings suggest that managerial responses to ASU 2016‐01 are influenced by a balance between incentive structures and the costs associated with adjusting investment strategies.

Abstract Security prices are affected by information strategically disclosed by managers as well as by informed trading of outsiders and vice versa. However, market frictions, such as short‐selling costs and constraints, significantly affect trading in financial markets. In this article, we examine the joint determination of voluntary disclosure, security prices, and short‐selling, and address the following issues: How do major market frictions affect managerial disclosures? How do disclosures influence strategic informed trading in the presence of frictions? What does the interaction of strategic disclosure and informed trading imply for price efficiency? We find that short‐selling (trading) costs have a substantial impact on the equilibrium disclosure policy and its interaction with informed trading and price efficiency. Because of endogenously binding short‐sale constraints, better‐informed traders can either deter or encourage disclosure, thus reconciling mixed available evidence on the relation between short‐sale constraints and managerial disclosure. Furthermore, price efficiency need not improve with managers' information endowment because greater disclosure can endogenously inhibit informed short‐selling in equilibrium. Our analysis also generates novel empirical predictions relevant to the literature on managerial disclosure, shorting, and price efficiency.

Abstract In this paper, I conduct three experiments to investigate whether and how relative performance information (RPI) influences employee advice‐seeking and how advice‐seeking, in turn, affects employees' trust in their manager. The first experiment shows that, in a setting where the manager can provide useful advice, RPI increases advice‐seeking frequency, which is marginally positively associated with trust in the manager. The second experiment indicates that RPI increases advice‐seeking frequency when the manager's advice is highly useful, with a marginally significant effect when the advice is of low usefulness. Mediation analyses reveal that RPI alleviates employees' concerns about self‐presentation toward their manager, thereby increasing advice‐seeking frequency, but only when the manager's advice is of high usefulness. The third experiment shows that advice usefulness impacts employees' trust in their manager by influencing their perceptions of managerial competence and benevolence. This paper discusses theoretical and practical implications of these findings.