Salesperson and executive compensation contracts typically specify a nonlinear relationship between firm revenues and pay. These agents therefore have incentive to manipulate prices, influence the timing of customer purchases, and vary effort over their firms' fiscal years. This paper empirically establishes results consistent with agents' focusing on performance over the fiscal year. Most notably, in addition to varying with the calendar business cycle, manufacturing firms' sales are higher at the end of the fiscal year, and lower at the beginning, than they are in the middle. Further evidence is found in fiscal-year price movements and patterns in the industry variation of fiscal-year effects.

The 1964 Securities Acts Amendments extended the mandatory disclosure requirements that had applied to listed firms since 1934 to large firms traded Over-the-Counter (OTC). We find several pieces of evidence indicating that investors valued these disclosure requirements, two of which are particularly striking. First, a firm-level event study reveals that the OTC firms most affected by the 1964 Amendments had abnormal excess returns of about 3.5 percent in the weeks immediately surrounding the announcement thai they had begun to comply with the new requirements. Second, we estimate that the most affected OTC firms had abnormal excess returns ranging between 11.5 and 22.1 percent in the period between when the legislation was initially proposed and when it went into force. These returns are adjusted for the standard four factors and are relative to NYSE/AMEX firms, matched on size and book-to-market equity, that were unaffected by the legislation. While we cannot determine how much of shareholders' gains were a transfer from insiders of these same companies, our results suggest that mandatory disclosure causes managers to focus more narrowly on maximizing shareholder value.