Companies’ earnings conference calls are perceived to be venues for sell‐side equity analysts to ask management questions. In this study, we examine another important conference call participant—the buy‐side analyst—that has been underexplored in the literature due to data limitations. Using a large sample of transcripts, we identify 3,834 buy‐side analysts from 701 institutional investment firms who participated (i.e., asked a question) in 13,332 conference calls to examine the determinants and implications of their participation. Buy‐side analysts are more likely to participate when sell‐side analyst coverage is low and dispersion in sell‐side earnings forecasts is high, consistent with buy‐side analysts participating when a company's information environment is poor. Institutional investors trade more of a company's stock in the quarters in which their buy‐side analysts participate in the call. Finally, we find evidence that buy‐side analyst participation is associated with company‐level absolute changes in future stock price, trading volume, institutional ownership, and short interest.

We study labor unions, an important stakeholder group that has not been a focus of the earnings smoothing literature. We posit that managers strike a balance between sheltering resources from employees’ profit sharing demands and catering to employees’ aversion to downside risk by smoothing earnings. We then hypothesize that a strong labor union would intensify managerial incentives to smooth earnings. Consistent with our hypothesis, we find that union strength is positively associated with earnings smoothing activities through management of both accruals and R&D expenditures.

Prior research emphasizes the centrality of audit offices in understanding auditing practices, and documents significant interoffice variation in audit outcomes based on industry expertise and office size. Our study examines how two city‐specific labor characteristics also affect audit offices and local audit markets: the city's average educational attainment, and the number of accountants in a city, which proxy for a city's human capital. Our argument draws on the urban economics literature and predicts that the level of human capital in a city is positively associated with an audit office's ability to conduct high‐quality audits. As expected, there is a positive association between audit quality (quality of audited earnings and accuracy of going‐concern reports) and average education level in the city in which the lead engagement office is located. This association is generally significant for both Big 4 and non‐Big 4 offices, but is relatively stronger for non‐Big 4 firms that are more tied to local labor markets. A company is also more likely to choose a non‐Big 4 auditor in cities with higher educational levels and relatively more accountants, and there is evidence of higher non‐Big 4 audit fees as a city's education level increases. Collectively, these results suggest that local labor characteristics affect audit offices, audit quality, and the ability of non‐Big 4 auditors to compete with Big 4 auditors in the audits of public companies.

We find that non‐Big 4 audit offices with greater awareness of SEC enforcement are more likely to issue first‐time going‐concern reports to distressed clients; where SEC “awareness” is measured using (i) audit office proximity to SEC regional offices, and (ii) proximity to specific SEC enforcement actions against auditors. We also show that these non‐Big 4 audit offices issue more going‐concern opinions to clients who do not subsequently fail, indicating a conservative bias that reduces the informativeness of audit reports. This conservative reporting bias is also associated with higher audit fees and higher auditor switching rates. These findings are important because non‐Big 4 firms now audit 39 percent of SEC registrants and issue 88 percent of going‐concern audit reports. For Big 4 offices, we find some evidence that awareness of SEC enforcement may improve reporting accuracy by reducing Type II errors (failing to issue a going‐concern report to a company that fails), although the number of cases is small.

We examine whether initial loan sales in the secondary loan market relate to borrowing firms’ accounting conservatism. We find that borrowing firms exhibit a significant decline in accounting conservatism after the initial loan sales. We show that the decline in borrower conservatism is more pronounced for firms that borrow from lenders with lower monitoring incentives and for firms that have lower incentives to supply conservatism. The baseline results are robust to a battery of sensitivity tests. Collectively, we provide corroborative evidence that lead lenders’ monitoring incentives enforce accounting conservatism in the private debt market, and that lead lenders play a more prominent role than secondary loan market participants in shaping corporate (conservative) reporting.

After the public outcry over backdating, many firms began scheduling option grants. This eliminates backdating but creates other agency problems: Chief executive officers (CEOs) aware of upcoming option grants have an incentive to temporarily depress stock prices to obtain lower strike prices. We show that some CEOs have manipulated stock prices to increase option compensation, documenting negative abnormal returns before scheduled option grants and positive abnormal returns afterward. These returns are explained by measures of CEOs’ incentives and ability to influence stock prices. We document several mechanisms used to lower stock price, including changing the substance and timing of disclosures.

Much of the variation in international trade volume is driven by firms’ extensive margin decisions of whether to participate in export markets. We evaluate how the information potential exporters possess influences their decisions. We estimate a model of export participation in which firms weigh the fixed costs of exporting against the forecasted profits from serving a foreign market. We adopt a moment inequality approach, placing weak assumptions on firms’ expectations. The framework allows us to test whether firms differ in the information they have about foreign markets. We find that larger firms possess better knowledge of market conditions in foreign countries, even when those firms have not exported in the past. Quantifying the value of information, we show that, in a typical destination, total exports rise while the number of exporters falls when firms have access to better information to forecast export revenues.

We model debt restructurings that could endogenously end in bankruptcy, and study spillovers to competitors’ operating decisions, profits, restructuring outcomes and security prices. We show that while bankruptcy could cause the firm’s share price to drop, bankruptcy always signals good news about the firm. We identify the conditions under which a bankruptcy also signals good news about competitors. We demonstrate that when a firm’s bankruptcy costs are relatively small, bankruptcy raises its share price while lowering the prices of competitors’ shares and debt as well as boosting the probability that they will enter bankruptcy. When there is little information asymmetry about the firm’s prospects, or the information asymmetry is about industry prospects, bankruptcy raises competitors’ share and debt prices and lowers their probability of bankruptcy.

This paper specifies term structure dynamics by a recursive cascade of heterogeneously persistent factors. The cascade naturally orders economic shocks by their adjustment speeds, and generates smooth interest-rate curves in closed form. For a class of specifications, the number of parameters is invariant to the size of the state space, and the term structure converges to a stochastic limit as the state dimension goes to infinity. High-dimensional specifications fit observed term structure almost perfectly, match the observed low correlation between movements in different maturities, and produce stable interest-rate forecasts that outperform lower-dimensional specifications.