This study examines peer effects in corporate disclosure decisions. Peer effects suggest that the average behavior of a group influences the behavior of individual group members. Consistent with peer effects, I find that disclosures made by industry peers induce firm disclosure. Peer effects in disclosure are more pronounced when a firm's strategic uncertainty is higher, indicating that peer firm disclosure reduces the external uncertainty arising from the firm's interaction with its industry peers and thus increases the precision of managerial private information. I also find that peer effects are stronger when a firm's dependence on external financing is greater, suggesting that peer firm disclosure increases the costs on firm visibility and reputation in capital markets. Overall, these findings suggest that peer firm disclosure shapes a firm's information environment.

We study the role of segment disaggregation in equity‐based pay contracts in diversified firms. Disaggregated segment disclosures can improve the observability of managerial actions in internal capital markets and thus increase implicit incentives for managers to allocate resources as desired by shareholders, substituting for explicit incentives provided to CEOs. We use the adoption of Statement of Financial Accounting Standards No. 131 as an identification strategy and find that firms affected by this segment reporting mandate significantly decreased the provision of equity‐based incentives in the post‐adoption period, especially for firms with higher operating volatilities. This effect is also more pronounced for firms with weaker board monitoring in the pre‐adoption period but with stronger external monitoring in the post‐adoption period. Overall, our results suggest that disaggregated segment disclosures reduce the use of equity‐based pay contracts in diversified firms by enhancing the monitoring of managers.

We view audit-quality choice as one among many that managers make to maximize firm value. We question whether audit-quality differences among publicly traded companies are of significant interest to investors, clients, and auditors and ask for research on this topic. Relatedly, we ask for research on whether auditors and their clients show behavior consistent with regulated audit quality exceeding the audit quality level demanded absent regulation. We propose that researchers incorporate the competitive advantages of auditors and the institutional features of the audit process into the definition of audit quality. We propose that audit quality research test for externalities and inefficiencies to understand whether auditors and their clients are choosing the efficient level of audit quality. We note the legislative, judicial, and executive powers residing in the PCAOB.

We investigate the role of Relative Performance Evaluation (RPE) theory in CEO pay and turnover using a product similarity-based definition of peers (Hoberg and Phillips 2016). RPE predicts that firms filter out common shocks (i.e., those affecting the firm and its peers) while evaluating CEO performance, and that the extent of filtering increases with the number of peers. Despite the intuitive appeal of the theory, previous tests of RPE find weak and inconsistent evidence, which we argue is due to the imprecise categorization of peers. Using product market peers, we find three pieces of evidence consistent with RPE in relation to CEO pay and forced turnover: (1) on average, firms partially filter out common shocks to stock returns, (2) the extent of filtering increases with the number of peers, and (3) firms completely filter out common shocks in the presence of a large number of peers.

We study how corporate boards set earnings performance targets in CEOs’ annual incentive plans (AIPs) and the implications for strategic management earning guidance. We find that corporate boards rely on management and analyst information in setting the earnings performance targets, and the weight placed on each signal increases with its precision. We also find that management earnings guidance issued before compensation committee meetings (“event-window management forecast (MF)”) is more pessimistic than that issued by the same firm at other times. The pessimism in the event-window MF is more pronounced when the expected managerial benefits of having lower performance targets are greater. Ex post, the event-window MF pessimism is associated with higher bonus payouts to CEOs. We use a theoretical framework to illustrate how the use of earnings performance targets might drive our findings. This study highlights boards’ tradeoffs in designing executive compensation and the resulting managerial strategic disclosure.