We show analysts’ own earnings forecasts predict error in their own forecasts of earnings at other horizons, which we argue provides a measure of the extent to which analysts inefficiently use information. We construct our measure by exploiting two sources of variation in analysts’...

The popular and academic literatures report that women, Blacks, Hispanics, and Native Americans are under-represented on US corporate boards of directors, relative to their incidence in the US labor force. We confirm this observation by tabulating the presence of female and under-represented...

In an attempt to address a lack of diversity on corporate boards, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) passed a rule in 2010, requiring firms to disclose whether they consider diversity in the director nomination process, and if so, how the policy's effectiveness is assessed. The rule...

We investigate the relation between tax risk and the cost of private debt. Tax risk can lead to significant negative outcomes, including penalties, interest and additional tax payments, which in turn can increase the uncertainty of future cash flows and make it costlier for a firm to borrow....

We study whether the sealing of a defendant's judicial records during a patent lawsuit filing correlates with the defendant's level of competition and disclosure. Courts permit sealing of judicial records when competitive damage outweighs the public interest in access to documents and records....

We investigate the impact of a firm's internal information asymmetry on its tax planning. Firms with more informed lower-level managers are described as having high internal information asymmetry, while those where top-level managers know more are characterized as having low internal information...

We show analysts’ own earnings forecasts predict error in their own forecasts of earnings at other horizons, which we argue provides a measure of the extent to which analysts inefficiently use information. We construct our measure by exploiting two sources of variation in analysts’...

I investigate the real effects of accounting rules that permit the inclusion of gains and losses from debt repurchases in reported income. Because the gains or losses from repurchasing a company's own debt securities are included on the firm's income statement, managers have incentives to...