This paper investigates the effect of investments in internal investor relations (IR) departments on firm outcomes. We find that companies initiating internal professional IR experience increases in disclosure, analyst following, institutional investor ownership, liquidity, and market valuation relative to a matched sample of control firms. We also examine the differential impact the exogenous shock of Regulation Fair Disclosure (Reg FD) had on firms with an established professional IR department. We find these IR firms more than doubled their level of public disclosure post-Reg FD. Despite IR firms losing a potential communications channel following Reg FD adoption, we find they did not suffer adversely and instead show a post-Reg FD increase in analyst following, institutional investors, and liquidity relative to a control sample of similar non-IR firms. This implies that the effectiveness of professionalized internal IR increased post-Reg FD consistent with IR firms being relatively better positioned to navigate the more complicated regulatory environment. JEL Classifications: D82; M41; G11; G12; G14; G24 Data Availability: Data are publicly available from the sources identified in the paper with the exception of the membership data from the National Investor Relations Institute, which is a proprietary dataset.

This study examines the conditions under which financial restatements lead corporate boards to dismiss external auditors and how the market responds to those dismissal announcements. We find that auditors are more likely to be dismissed after more severe restatements but that the severity effect is primarily attributable to the dismissal of non-Big 4 auditors rather than Big 4 auditors. We also document that among corporations with Big 4 auditors, those that are larger and more complex operationally are less likely to dismiss their auditors. Combined, this evidence suggests that firms with higher switching costs and fewer replacement auditor choices are less likely to dismiss their auditors after a restatement, which is informative to the debates about the costs and benefits of mandatory auditor rotation and limited competition in the audit market. Additionally, we examine contemporaneous executive turnover and find evidence that boards view auditor dismissals as complementary rather than substitute responses to restatements. Finally, we investigate the market reaction to auditor dismissals after restatements. The market reaction to the dismissal is significantly more positive following more severe restatements (5.9 percent) relative to less severe restatements (0.6 percent) when the client engages a comparably sized auditor. This positive market reaction is consistent with firms restoring financial reporting credibility by replacing their auditors and highlights the important role that auditors play in the financial markets. Data Availability: Data are available from public sources indicated in the text.

The expectations management literature has so far focused on firms meeting the analyst consensus forecast—the expectations of analysts as a group—at earnings announcements. In this study we argue that investors may use individual analyst forecasts as additional benchmarks in evaluating reported earnings because the consensus forecast underutilizes private information contained in individual analyst forecasts. We predict that measures reflecting such private information have incremental explanatory power over the consensus forecast for the market's reaction to earnings news. We find results consistent with this prediction by examining two measures: (1) the percentage of individual forecasts met and (2) meeting the key analyst forecast. We extend the literature by documenting the role of individual analyst forecasts in investors' evaluations of reported earnings. JEL Classifications: G10; G11; G17; G14; G24. Data Availability: Data are publicly available from the sources identified in the paper.

We investigate how the tone of sell-side debt analysts' discussions about debt-equity conflict events affects the informativeness of debt analysts' reports in debt markets. Conflict events such as mergers and acquisitions, debt issuance, share repurchases, or dividend payments potentially generate asset substitution or wealth expropriation by equity holders. We document that debt analysts routinely discuss these conflict events in their reports. More importantly, discussions about conflict events that we code as negative are associated with increases in credit spreads and bond trading volume. Consistent with the informational value of debt analysts' discussions in secondary debt markets, we find that negatively coded conflict discussions predict higher bond offering yields in the primary bond market. In additional analyses, we measure the tone of debt analysts' discussions based on their disagreement with the tone of equity analysts' discussions and find that the informativeness of debt analysts' reports is higher when our coding indicates that conflict events are viewed negatively by debt analysts but positively by equity analysts.