Investor relations officers (IROs) play a central role in corporate communications with Wall Street. We survey 610 IROs at U.S. public companies and conduct 14 follow-up interviews to deepen our understanding of the role of IROs in corporate disclosure events. Three important themes emerge from our results: (i) the value, nature, and timing of private communication between IROs, analysts, and investors; (ii) the significant influence IROs have on corporate disclosures; and (iii) the degree of “theater” involved in public earnings conference calls, even the Q&A portion. We provide insights into the investor relations, analyst, institutional investor, and disclosure literatures.

We examine how firms' accounting quality affects their reaction to monetary policy. The balance sheet channel of monetary policy predicts that the quality of firms' accounting reports plays a role in transmitting monetary policy by affecting information asymmetries between firms and capital providers. Consistent with this prediction, we find that accounting quality moderates firms' equity market response and future investment sensitivity to unexpected changes in monetary policy. Moreover, the former relation is amplified for firms with more growth opportunities and more financial constraints, further consistent with accounting quality moderating the transmission of monetary policy.

We find that firms’ tax planning exhibits strategic reactions: firms respond to changes in their industry-competitors’ tax planning by changing their own tax planning in the same direction. We document evidence of these strategic reactions in two distinct research settings that entail an exogenous increase and decrease in competitors’ tax planning. We also find evidence that strategic reactions stem from concerns about appearing more tax aggressive than industry competitors, some evidence that they stem from firms learning from the tax planning of their industry competitors, and no consistent evidence that they stem from leader-follower dynamics.