We examine whether analysts' incentives are associated with street earnings. Because prior research argues that analysts' incentives to promote stocks increase in the extent to which the stock exhibits glamour characteristics, we predict that analysts are more likely to make income‐increasing adjustments in determining street earnings for glamour stocks than for value stocks. We find that analysts are more likely to exclude expense items from street earnings for glamour stocks than for value stocks and that excluded expense items help predict future earnings for glamour stocks but not for value stocks. Overall, our results suggest that analysts' self‐interest influences street earnings and this self‐interest leads to street earnings that are less useful in predicting future earnings for glamour stocks.

Section 1502 of the Dodd–Frank Act requires SEC‐registered issuers to conduct supply chain due diligence and submit conflict minerals disclosures (CMDs) that indicate whether their products contain tantalum, tin, tungsten, or gold (3TG) sourced from the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) or its neighboring countries (“covered countries”). Consistent with the reputational cost hypothesis, we find that heightened public attention to CMDs increases responsible sourcing. After Section 1502 takes effect, we find higher demand for 3TG products processed in certified smelters, decreased conflicts in covered countries’ mining regions relative to other regions, and reduced sensitivity of conflict risk to conflict minerals’ price spikes. Finally, we find that conflicts decrease in Eastern DRC territories with prevalent 3T (tantalum, tin, and tungsten) mines but increase in territories with prevalent gold mines. Overall, our findings highlight the real effects of enhanced supply chain transparency regulation.

This study examines whether a real production activity measure, firm‐level electricity consumption growth, is useful in detecting firm financial misreporting. Identifying proxies for a firm's underlying financial performance that are not a function of the firm's accounting system is essential for detection of misreporting. We propose that the difference between revenue growth and electricity consumption growth (i.e., growth wedge (GW)) is a useful signal of financial misreporting. Using electricity consumption data for Korean firms from 2006 to 2014, we find that the GW is positively associated with discretionary revenues and accruals and the likelihood of financial misreporting as proxied by accounting restatements, qualified audit opinions, and regulatory enforcement actions. The GW provides incremental information over firm characteristics and earnings management signals examined by prior research. Our findings are robust to a battery of additional tests, including within‐firm and industry comparisons that do not require access to cross‐sectional firm‐level electricity data. Overall, our study documents new evidence on the role of a real production activity measure from an independent reporting entity in detecting financial misreporting. Our evidence speaks to the potential usefulness of real activity metrics in forensic economics.

We study the economic consequences of managers’ vocal delivery quality during earnings conference calls. We introduce a novel measure, vocal delivery quality, that captures the acoustic comprehensibility of audio information for an average listener. Our measure relies on a deep-learning algorithm applied to a large sample of earnings call audio files. Consistent with predictions from the psychology and accounting literatures, we find evidence that the quality of managers’ vocal delivery deteriorates when they deliver negative news, such as a decrease in earnings or negative narrative information, and positive but transitory earnings news. We show that the stock market reacts in real time to managers’ vocal delivery quality. We also document that the vocal delivery quality has an effect on information intermediaries such as analysts and the media. Overall, our findings underscore the role of vocal dimensions in corporate oral disclosures.

We examine the informational role of geographically proximate institutions in stock markets. We find that both the level of and change in local institutional ownership predict future stock returns, particularly for firms with high information asymmetry; in contrast, such predictive abilities are relatively weak for nonlocal institutional ownership. The local advantage is especially evident for local investment advisors, high local ownership institutions, and high local turnover institutions. We also find that the stocks that local institutional investors hold (trade) earn higher excess returns around future earnings announcements than those that nonlocal institutional investors hold (trade).

In this study, we investigate whether managerial ability is related to income smoothing and, if so, whether smoothing associated with managerial ability improves the informativeness of earnings and stock prices about future performance. Using a large sample of firms, we find that managerial ability is positively related to smoothing. More importantly, we show that high-ability managers incorporate more forward-looking information about cash flows into current earnings through smoothing, thereby enhancing earnings informativeness. We also find that smoothing associated with high-ability managers improves stock price informativeness about future cash flows. Our study should be of interest to researchers, practitioners, and others concerned with understanding the determinants and usefulness of smoothing.

This paper examines whether industry efforts to decrease managerial discretion, increase uniformity, and improve transparency of a non-GAAP performance measure change voluntary disclosure and market perceptions. We find that the frequency of REITs meeting or beating analysts' expectations of funds from operations (FFO) decreases following explicit industry initiatives to discourage manipulation. Concurrent with this shift, we find that the information content of FFO to investors increased, particularly for firms reporting a reconciliation of FFO with GAAP earnings. We also examine firms in other industries to assess alternative explanations for these results, such as SEC intervention. Collectively, our findings suggest that industry guidance about non-GAAP performance curtailed managers' opportunistic reporting. Furthermore, the market response to FFO is consistent with investors perceiving less manipulation and greater reliability. Our evidence also supports the SEC's subsequent requirement that all non-GAAP disclosures be reconciled to the nearest GAAP measures.