We find that contrary to popular belief, CEOs with long compensation duration do not make better long-term investment decisions. Using a comprehensive pay duration measure, we find that acquisitions conducted by CEOs with long compensation duration receive more negative announcement returns, and experience significantly worse post-acquisition abnormal operating and stock performance, compared with deals conducted by CEOs with short compensation duration. The negative correlation between compensation duration and mergers and acquisitions (M&A) performance is driven by long-term time-vesting plans, not by performance-vesting plans. The results suggest that extending CEO pay horizons without implementing performance requirements is insufficient to improve managerial long-term investment decisions.

We find that a new compensation disclosure item on expected payouts from performance-based stock grants reveals unique information regarding future firm performance. Extracting inferred performance expectations from the disclosures, we find that firms disclosing the highest expected grant payout significantly outperform in ROA, Q, sales growth, and profit margin over the next two years, while those disclosing the lowest expected payout underperform. The embedded information is not captured by other information channels, such as managerial earnings guidance, 10-K sentiment, insider selling activities, unexplained CEO pay, and analyst forecasts. Investors and analysts do not fully incorporate the information and are later surprised around earnings announcement days. A portfolio that buys firms with the highest performance expectation and shorts firms with the lowest expectation earns significantly positive abnormal returns. Our findings suggest that the enhanced compensation disclosure contains valuable information, but investors underreact to information that is difficult to collect and process.

Using individual records of about 950,000 financial advisors, we find that the probability and intensity of financial advisor misconduct significantly increase after local newspaper closures. The impact is more pronounced in counties with a higher proportion of seniors, minorities, and individuals with lower education levels. Male advisors are more likely to commit misconduct following newspaper closures than female advisors. The sensitivity of advisors’ job turnover to misconduct decreases after closures, suggesting a lower cost of committing misconduct. Our evidence indicates that local newspapers play a distinct role in mitigating financial advisor misconduct, as media exposure raises the costs of misbehavior.

Using the extreme returns of firms in unrelated industries of institutional shareholders' portfolios as exogenous variations in institutional investor distraction (Kempf et al. 2017), we find a positive and significant relation between institutional shareholder distraction and stock price crash risk. The effect is associated with weakened monitoring, and it becomes stronger when alternative corporate governance is weaker and when managers' incentives to hoard bad information are stronger. Managers reduce firms' accounting conservatism when institutional investors become distracted, which is evidence of an increased motivation to hoard bad news. Overall, our findings shed additional light on the important monitoring role of institutional investors in corporate governance.

Using a hand-collected sample of 18,269 equity analysts from 42 countries over the period of 2004 to 2019, we establish an intriguing negative association between a country’s institutional/economic development and its female share of equity analysts. We show that, in individualistic countries only, there is no gender gap in analyst forecast accuracy. We further show that female analysts are more skilled and more likely to drop out when underperforming in individualistic countries compared to peers in collectivistic countries. The evidence supports our hypothesis that the national cultural value of individualism encourages women to make career choices consistent with their general aversion to competition.