We investigate whether senior officers use accrual-based earnings management to meet voluntary earnings disclosure (i.e., management earnings forecasts) before selling or buying their own shares when they have private information. This study is the first to use the differences in timing of trades by senior officers and other insiders (e.g., directors or large shareholders) to infer information asymmetry. We hypothesize that the timing of senior officers' trades with no other insiders' trades at the same time indicates opportunistic trades and asymmetric information between senior officers and other insiders. Our results show that senior officers' exclusive sales are negatively associated with future returns, indicating that they tend to use insider information. Moreover, senior officers are more likely to meet their earnings forecasts when they plan to sell stocks.

We investigate the role of gender on the aggressiveness of sell-side analysts' questions during earnings conference calls. Our tests reveal that the verbal aggressiveness of analysts' questions is significantly associated with both the gender of the analyst asking the question and the gender of the CEO fielding the question. First, we find that male analysts are more verbally aggressive than female analysts. Specifically, male analysts' questions are more direct and more likely to be followed with further questions, to have a preface statement, and to be negative, all of which are consistent with verbal aggressiveness. Second, male analysts' questions to female CEOs are more aggressive than their questions to male CEOs. Gender-based verbal aggressiveness appears to be associated with analysts' career trajectories: female analysts who ask aggressive questions have a higher likelihood of becoming “star” analysts, whereas we fail to find such evidence for male analysts.

This article provides first evidence on the capital market effects of the EU Taxonomy Regulation (TR). The TR introduced a new classification scheme to identify companies with environmentally sustainable economic activities. The results offer support for a significant estimated TR alignment premium, compatible with the interpretation that investors already apply the TR and allocate capital to TR-aligned companies. This effect strengthens with an increase in investor attention. We also find significant cross-sectional variation in abnormal stock returns surrounding the publication date of the TR conditional on the degree of estimated TR alignment. Traditional ESG ratings cannot explain the TR premium.