When a firm issues a management forecast, analysts who have observed more forecasts from this firm since covering it (i.e., have more MF-Experience) subsequently improve their own accuracy more and provide timelier earnings forecasts for other (non-issuing) firms in the same industry. We also find that, subsequent to a management forecast, investors are more responsive to forecast revisions for non-issuing firms made by analysts with more MF-Experience. Further tests suggest that our results are not explained by endogeneity in firm coverage. Data Availability: Data are commercially available.

This paper studies how peer performance affects firms’ earnings management decisions. Using peer firms’ idiosyncratic returns as an exogenous peer performance measure and the instrumental variable approach, we find that higher peer performance leads to higher discretionary accruals. This effect is salient for both industry leaders and followers and is robust to alternative discretionary accrual measures and alternative peer definitions. We examine two mechanisms through which peer performance affects firms’ earnings management. We find that analysts revise their earnings forecasts according to peer performance and that when peer performance is higher, firms are less likely to meet or beat analyst consensus without managing earnings. This evidence suggests a capital market pressure mechanism. In addition, the effect of peer performance is more pronounced in firms using relative performance evaluation, suggesting a compensation pressure mechanism. In sum, our evidence suggests that managers report opportunistically to match peer performance.

We examine the effect of media coverage on firm innovation. Using a comprehensive sample of corporate news coverage and patenting over the period from 2000 to 2012, we find a negative relation between media coverage and firm innovation. We further document the two offsetting economic mechanisms underlying the impact of media coverage on innovation: the media’s role of short-term pressure on managers relates negatively to innovation, while its role of mitigating financial constraints is positively associated with innovation. Our findings provide new insights into the effect of news coverage on firms’ long-term growth.

Using a sample of completed U.S. acquisition deals over the period 1984–2014, we find that acquirer organization capital as measured by capitalized selling, general, and administrative (SG&A) expenses is associated with superior deal performance. We show that high organization-capital acquirers achieve significantly higher abnormal announcement period returns, and better post-merger operating and stock performance, than low organization-capital acquirers. Additional tests suggest a causal relation between acquirer organization capital and deal performance. We further show that post-merger, high organization-capital acquirers cut more on the cost of goods sold, invest more in SG&A expenses, and achieve greater asset turnover and innovative efficiency.

We find negative price reactions among non-sued U.S.-listed foreign firms to filings of U.S. shareholder lawsuits targeting firms from their home country. This country spillover effect is stronger for lawsuits, especially accounting-related ones, targeting firms from more poorly-governed countries. We also document a stronger country spillover effect for a recent wave of U.S. lawsuits targeting Chinese issuers than for other standalone litigation. Finally, a foreign firm's price reaction to lawsuits targeting its country peers predicts its chance of being sued in the future. Our findings are consistent with investors updating a foreign firm's litigation risk upon lawsuits targeting its country peers.

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.

We study environmental and social (E&S) disclosures in annual reports. Using the word embedding model to examine over 210,000 annual reports from 24,271 public firms in 30 international countries/regions between 2001 and 2020, we create an E&S dictionary that allows us to document trends in annual report E&S disclosure. Specifically, we find: (1) increases in length and boilerplate language and (2) decreases in specificity. Our results also suggest that E&S disclosure quality improves after the adoption of voluntary ESG reporting frameworks but deteriorates after disclosure mandates. Our findings provide systematic evidence on the evolution of E&S disclosure in annual reports over the past two decades and shed light on how voluntary and mandatory standards have shaped global E&S reporting practices.

We create a culture dictionary using one of the latest machine learning techniques—the word embedding model—and 209,480 earnings call transcripts. We score the five corporate cultural values of innovation, integrity, quality, respect, and teamwork for 62,664 firm-year observations over the period 2001–2018. We show that an innovative culture is broader than the usual measures of corporate innovation – R&D expenses and the number of patents. Moreover, we show that corporate culture correlates with business outcomes, including operational efficiency, risk-taking, earnings management, executive compensation design, firm value, and deal making, and that the culture-performance link is more pronounced in bad times. Finally, we present suggestive evidence that corporate culture is shaped by major corporate events, such as mergers and acquisitions.

We conduct the first large-scale study of how different stakeholder groups assess corporate culture and quantify the economic implications of those differences. We employ generative AI to analyze analyst reports, call transcripts, and employee reviews, and organize the extracted information into a knowledge graph that links a culture type to its perceived causes and effects. We demonstrate that the divergence in different stakeholder groups' assessment of culture aligns with their distinct roles and economic incentives. Moreover, we show that analysts' culture analyses are incorporated into stock recommendations and target prices, and investors react to divergence in stakeholders' assessment of culture.