Managers frequently attribute the news in their earnings forecasts to various economic events. Using textual analysis, we identify the economic factors underlying earnings news from press releases. We document a wide range of industry‐wide shocks and firm‐specific actions to which the earnings news in management forecasts is attributed. As expected, earnings attributions significantly affect peer firms’ price reactions to the earnings news. Specifically, earnings news attributed to industry‐wide trends or firm structural changes leads to positive information transfers but earnings news attributed to firm competitive moves triggers negative information transfers. Information transfers are much stronger when each economic factor is mentioned the first time in a given industry‐year. Further analysis reveals that the strength of information transfers varies with firm‐level rivalry within the industry (i.e., similar business strategies, market position, and level of competition).

We examine the role of the chief marketing officer (CMO) in corporate voluntary disclosure of future revenues. Using a sample of S&P 1500 firms for the period from 2003 to 2011, we find that the presence of an influential CMO in top management is positively associated with the likelihood of a firm issuing a management revenue forecast. We also find that firms with an influential CMO provide more accurate revenue forecasts than other firms. These findings extend to long-window change analyses and are robust to the use of a propensity score matched-pair approach. Overall, the results are consistent with the notion that CMO influence in top management appears to play an important role in voluntary revenue disclosures. JEL Classifications: M12; M31; M41. Data Availability: All data are publicly available from sources identified in the paper.

Theory argues that career concerns (i.e., concerns about the impact of current performance on contemporaneous and future compensation) encourage managers to withhold bad news disclosure. However, empirical evidence regarding the extent to which a manager's career concerns are associated with a delay in bad news disclosure is limited. Across multiple proxies for career concerns, we find that the extent to which managers delay bad news is positively associated with their level of career concerns. Then, we hand-collect data on a compensation contract that firms use to reduce CEOs' career concerns (i.e., ex ante severance pay agreements). We find that if managers receive a sufficiently large payment in the event of dismissal, they no longer delay the disclosure of bad news. Overall, our findings support prior theoretical evidence that managers delay bad news disclosure due to career concerns and suggest a mechanism through which firms can mitigate the delay. JEL Classifications: M12; M41. Data Availability: Data are available from the public sources cited in the text.