This paper presents a model in which the CEO generates productive output while the CFO oversees a reporting system that provides information useful for monitoring, decision-making, and contracting, but is also subject to costly manipulation. Because the reporting system serves multiple roles,...

CFOs wear many hats, as the primary agents responsible for financial reporting and control and as strategic partners within firms' top management teams. This paper uses an agency model to investigate how the role and responsibilities of the CFO affect reporting quality, firm value, and incentive...

We provide evidence that higher-quality disclosure standards are associated with stock returns that are less sensitive to noise driven by investors' moods. We identify return-mood sensitivity (RMS) based on the association between index returns and urban cloudiness, a source of short-term...

High quality disclosures can promote investor confidence and facilitate capital market development, but evidence on market-level consequences of confidence associated with disclosures is sparse. Using a survey-based measure that directly captures beliefs about disclosure quality in a panel with...

Using a survey-based measure that directly captures beliefs about disclosure quality (SFARS) in a panel with over 1,000 country-year observations, this study examines macro-level capital market consequences of confidence in disclosure quality. Supporting construct validity, SFARS is associated...

This study examines whether investor-level preferences for director characteristics influence portfolio choices, using data on the U.S. holdings of non-U.S. funds. Consistent with bias-based preferences influencing portfolio allocations, funds from countries with greater gender inequality invest...

This paper uses holdings and outage data from Robinhood and transaction-level data from U.S. exchanges to examine how retail investors affect the pricing of public earnings information. We find that retail trader activity is associated with prices that are more responsive to earnings surprises,...

We examine how disclosure impacts monitoring spillovers between competing passive and active funds. In our model, funds use fees and monitoring capacities to compete with each other over fund flows from a set of heterogeneous risk-averse investors. We provide conditions for when passive and...

Building on archival, anecdotal, and survey evidence on managers' roles in accounting manipulations, I develop an agency model to examine the effects of a CEO's power to pressure a CFO to bias a performance measure, like earnings. This power has implications for incentive compensation, reporting...

I present a critique on the common assumption of fixed proprietary costs of disclosure used in discretionary disclosure models. I show that proprietary costs that are fixed, i.e., independent of the disclosed information, are inherently contradictory. To sustain independence requires either that...