ABSTRACT: Managers have great discretion in determining forecast characteristics, but little is known about how managerial incentives affect these characteristics. This paper examines whether managers strategically choose forecast precision for self-serving purposes. Building on the prior finding that the market reaction to vague forecasts is weaker than its reaction to precise forecasts, we find that for management forecasts disclosed before insider sales, more positive (negative) news forecasts are more (less) precise than other management forecasts. The opposite applies to management forecasts disclosed before insider purchases. These results are consistent with managers strategically choosing forecast precision to increase stock prices before insider sales and to decrease stock prices before insider purchases. Additional analyses indicate that the impact of managerial incentives on forecast precision is less pronounced when institutional ownership is high or when disclosure risk is high, and is more pronounced when investors have difficulty in assessing the precision of managers' information. Data Availability: The data used in this study are publicly available from the sources indicated in the text.

ABSTRACT In‐house human capital tax investment is a significant input to a firm's tax decisions. Yet, due to the lack of data on corporate in‐house tax departments, there is little empirical evidence on how tax departments are associated with tax planning and compliance outcomes. We expect the size of tax departments to be positively associated with the effectiveness of tax planning and compliance. Using hand‐collected data on the number of corporate tax employees in S&P 1500 firms over the 2009–2014 period, we find that firms with larger tax departments are associated with lower and less volatile cash effective tax rates. Furthermore, using tax employees' specialization, we identify tax departments' relative focus on planning or compliance and document a trade‐off between tax avoidance and tax risk. Specifically, tax departments with more of a tax planning focus have incrementally greater tax avoidance but higher tax risk, whereas tax departments with more of a tax compliance focus have incrementally lower tax risk but higher tax rates. Overall, this paper contributes to the literature by looking inside the “black box” of corporate tax departments and shedding light on the importance of human capital tax investment for tax outcomes.

ABSTRACT We examine how short sellers affect long‐run management forecasts using a natural experiment (Regulation SHO) that relaxes short‐selling constraints on a group of randomly selected firms (referred to as pilot firms). We find that compared to other firms, the pilot firms issue more long‐run good news forecasts but do not change the frequency of long‐run bad news forecasts. The increase in good news forecasts is greater when the pilot firms have higher‐quality forecasts, greater uncertainty about firm value, or higher manager equity incentives. Overall, these results and the results of additional analyses indicate that the reduction in short‐selling constraints and the increase in short‐selling threat induce managers to enhance disclosures through more long‐run good news forecasts to discourage short sellers.

ABSTRACT Prior research finds that the decline in the information content of earnings after restatement announcements is short-lived and the earnings response coefficient (ERC) bounces back after three quarters. We re-examine this issue using a more recent and comprehensive sample of restatements. We find that material restatement firms experience a significant decrease in the ERC over a prolonged period—close to three years after restatement announcements. In contrast, other restatement firms experience a decline in the ERC for only one quarter. We further find that among material restatement firms, those that are subject to more credibility concerns and those that do not take prompt actions to improve reporting credibility experience a longer drop in the ERC. Last, reconciling with prior research, we find that using a more powerful proxy for material restatements and imposing less restrictive sampling requirements help to increase the power of the tests to detect the long-run drop in the ERC. Data Availability: The data are available from the sources indicated in the text.

While prior studies have examined whether financial analysts affect corporate innovation, there is little research on the mechanism through which this occurs. In this paper, we examine whether and how analysts' questions about innovation during site visits affect corporate innovation. Using a sample of corporate site visits in China, we find that when analysts ask questions about innovation during site visits, firms invest more in R&D in the future. Consistent with knowledge diffusion across firms, this association is stronger when analysts cover more firms in the same industry, when firms share similar technologies as industry peers, and when an innovation‐expert analyst is present at site visits. We also find that analysts' questions about innovation during site visits are positively associated with the quantity and quality of firms' patent applications in the future. Overall, we provide evidence that analysts can affect corporate innovation through their questions about firms' innovation activities.

ABSTRACT We examine the stock price impact of corporate site visits using a unique data set of site visits to listed firms in China. Our main findings are as follows. First, the market reaction around corporate site visits is statistically and economically significant and is stronger for group visits, visits conducted by mutual fund managers, visits covering accounting and finance topics, visits to firms with poor information environments, and visits to manufacturing firms. Second, the stock returns around site visits are positively associated with firms’ future performance. Third, the changes in visiting funds’ holdings are more predictive of firms’ future performance than those of nonvisiting funds. Overall, this study contributes to the literature by providing evidence that site visits are important venues for investors to collect information about firms and make informed trades.

Taxes represent a significant cost to the firm and shareholders, and it is generally expected that shareholders prefer tax aggressiveness. However, this argument ignores potential non-tax costs that can accompany tax aggressiveness, especially those arising from agency problems. Firms owned/run by founding family members are characterized by a unique agency conflict between dominant and small shareholders. Using multiple measures to capture tax aggressiveness and founding family presence, we find that family firms are less tax aggressive than their non-family counterparts, ceteris paribus. This result suggests that family owners are willing to forgo tax benefits to avoid the non-tax cost of a potential price discount, which can arise from minority shareholders’ concern with family rent-seeking masked by tax avoidance activities [Desai and Dharmapala, 2006. Corporate tax avoidance and high-powered incentives. Journal of Financial Economics 79, 145–179]. Our result is also consistent with family owners being more concerned with the potential penalty and reputation damage from an IRS audit than non-family firms. We obtain similar inferences when using a small sample of tax shelter cases.

ABSTRACT How to address managerial short-termism is an important issue for companies, regulators, and researchers. We examine the effect of CEO contractual protection, in the form of employment agreements and severance pay agreements, on managerial short-termism. We find that firms with CEO contractual protection are less likely to cut R&D expenditures to avoid earnings decreases and are less likely to engage in real earnings management. The effect of CEO contractual protection is both statistically and economically significant. We further find that this effect increases with the duration and monetary strength of CEO contractual protection. The cross-sectional analyses indicate that the effect is stronger for firms in more homogeneous industries and for firms with higher transient institutional ownership, as protection is particularly important for CEOs in these firms, and is stronger when there are weaker alternative monitoring mechanisms. JEL Classifications: G32; M40

ABSTRACT In this paper, we examine why Chinese reverse merger (RM) firms have lower financial reporting quality than U.S. IPO firms. We find that the financial reporting quality of U.S. RM firms is similar to that of matched U.S. IPO firms, but Chinese RM firms exhibit lower financial reporting quality than Chinese ADR firms. We also find that Chinese RM firms exhibit lower financial reporting quality than U.S. RM firms. These results indicate that the use of the RM process is associated with poor financial reporting quality only in firms from China, where legal enforcement and investor protection are weak. In addition, we find that compared with Chinese ADR firms, Chinese RM firms have weaker bonding incentives (as measured by CEO turnover-performance sensitivity) and poorer corporate governance. These factors, in turn, contribute to the lower financial reporting quality of Chinese RM firms. Overall, our results suggest that the less scrutinized RM process allows the Chinese firms with weak bonding incentives and poor governance to gain access to U.S. capital markets, resulting in poor financial reporting quality. JEL Classifications: G15; G24; G34; G38.