Consistent with the economics of crime approach, this paper finds that insider selling is decreasing in the perceived costs of potential private and public enforcement upon discovery of GAAP misstatements, and increasing in managerial private benefits as measured by the market reaction to the misstatement announcement. Additionally, insiders at fraud firms sell more on average, although the intensity of their trades is less likely to be associated with the magnitude of their private information. Further analysis suggests that managers perceive a higher cost of public enforcement in the post-Enron period.

Relying on the well-established theoretical result that uncertainty has a common and an idiosyncratic component, we propose a new measure of earnings forecast uncertainty as the sum of dispersion among analysts and the variance of mean forecast errors estimated by a GARCH model. The new measure is based on both common and private information available to analysts at the time they make their forecasts. Hence, it alleviates some of the limitations of other commonly used proxies for forecast uncertainty in the literature. Using analysts' earnings forecasts, we find direct evidence of the new measure's superior performance.

We examine a routine and timely disclosure, earnings press releases, to determine the extent to which several novel qualitative elements of such disclosures are associated with changes in sell‐side financial analysts' information environment. Using a comprehensive set of GARCH‐based (generalized autoregressive conditional heteroscedasticity) proxies, we examine how disclosure readability's components, across‐document textual similarity, and within‐document lexical diversity alter analysts' information environment. We find that readability in the form of shorter sentences, textual similarity, and lexical diversity are strongly related to decreases in analysts' uncertainty. Further, shorter sentences and lexical diversity improve both public and private information precision, whereas similarity affects solely analysts' private information precision. While the GARCH ‐based proxies allow us to alleviate concerns regarding potentially spurious inferences (Sheng and Thevenot 2012), we note as a caveat that such an estimation restricts our inferences to large, stable, and heavily followed firms. These findings should be of interest to analysts who may wish to explore the latent information contained within the qualitative elements of disclosure, regulators who direct the form and content of disclosure, and academics who study the use (and possible misuse) of various forms of information and its presentation.

We investigate intra-industry information transfer to news of a significant corporate event, forced CEO turnover. Intra-industry information transfer occurs when announcements made by one or more firms in an industry contemporaneously affect stock prices of peer firms. We find results strongly consistent with information transfer in response to forced CEO turnover, as evidenced by significant cumulative abnormal returns for industry peer firms around the time of a turnover announcement. We further document that information transfer is stronger to turnovers that signal a firm-CEO mismatch prompted by changing industry conditions (Eisfeldt and Kuhnen 2013). Considering two moderating factors, we find weaker (stronger) information transfer when the CEO was replaced with an outsider (the announcing firm is an industry leader), providing additional evidence that forced CEO turnover at one firm can be indicative of industry-wide changes. Our study has important implications to financial analysts, investors, and boards of directors in assessing changing industry conditions in light of a forced CEO turnover at a peer firm.