Management enjoys tremendous discretion in what information they discuss in earnings announcements (EAs) and how they present this information. We develop an extensive dataset cataloging the nature of discussion of a wide range of financial metrics in EAs from 2004-2019. We begin by identifying...

Bentley (2019) finds that narrative reporting reduces operating distortion. We extend this research to examine the effect of narrative reporting in a team setting. We manipulate whether narrative reporting is at the individual level, the team lead level, or is absent. We also manipulate whether...

Advisors frequently have an interest in the decisions their advisees make, forcing advisees to distinguish their advisor’s unbiased beliefs from their self-interested bias. This task is likely to be especially hard when psychological forces distort advisors’ beliefs to make some of their...

We investigate whether and how a “critical audit matter” (CAM) disclosure affects managers' real operating decisions in two contexts (issuing a loan that decreases versus increases the average risk profile of loan portfolios, or choosing to hedge versus speculate on commodity risk). We...

Full paper is available at: "https://ssrn.com/abstract=2427106" https://ssrn.com/abstract=2427106“What Counts and What Gets Counted” (Bloomfield 2016) is an innovative way of teaching managerial accounting. The 1st edition of the book won the 2014 Jim Bulloch Award for Innovations in...

Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) is an increasingly popular source of experimental subjects for accounting research due to its convenience and low cost (relative to traditional laboratories). However, MTurk presents challenges related to statistical power and reliability. These challenges are not...

Prior surveys have documented that elite US managers see operating distortions as more acceptable ways to hit benchmarks than reporting distortions (Bruns and Merchant 1990; Graham, Harvey, and Rajgopal 2005). To assess the generality of this difference and understand variation in attitudes toward...

We analyze management's emphasis (i.e., prominence, frequency, and textual highlighting) of GAAP metrics within the narrative portion of earnings announcement press releases; we assess whether management uses emphasis opportunistically, informatively, or both. We find that management emphasizes...