We examine how resilient firms’ financial reporting processes are to the sudden death of a Chief Financial Officer (CFO)—a plausibly exogenous shock that allows us to provide insights on the role of the CFO while abstracting away from the endogenous nature of CFO employment. We find that the likelihood of an adverse reporting event—a delayed SEC filing or ex post restatement—doubles in the year following the event, on average. The financial process is less resilient in more complex firms and more resilient in firms with stronger internal controls and highly educated employees. Sudden CEO deaths, in contrast, have no discernible impact on adverse financial reporting events. Collectively, our study highlights the value of the CFO on the financial reporting process as well as potential financial reporting benefits of CFO contingency plans. Data Availability: Data are available from the sources cited in the text.

Research documents price co‐movements, or “spillovers,” between focal firms and their peers at focal firms’ earnings announcements. We find that both signed and absolute co‐movements between focal‐ and peer‐firm returns are significantly lower at earnings‐announcement dates compared to other dates. Analytically, we demonstrate that co‐movements do not necessarily indicate common information; instead, co‐movements measure the relative proportion of focal firm‐specific information to common information in focal‐firm earnings announcements. We study three settings where information transfers might be higher: when focal firms report significant earnings surprises, are industry leaders, or share correlated earnings patterns with peer firms. We continue to find lower return correlations during focal‐firm earnings announcements. We conduct two alternative tests but fail to find evidence that common information released during focal‐firm earnings announcements is significantly greater than on other days. These results raise doubt about the extent of the information externality attributable to financial‐report releases.