Recent research finds that many analyst recommendation revisions take place shortly after earnings announcements. Altinkilic and Hansen (2009) attribute the clustering of recommendations to analysts strategically piggybacking on earnings information to improve the perceived performance of their...

This paper examines whether firms that deviate from an empirically modeled (“expected”) credit rating engage in earnings management activities, as measured by abnormal accruals and real activities earnings management. We find evidence that firms use income-increasing (-decreasing) earnings...

Using hand-collected data on analyst locations, we study how geographic proximity affects analyst coverage decisions for U.S. firms that went public during 1996–2009, along with the impact of local coverage on firm visibility. Analysts are 80% more likely to cover local firms than non-local...

We investigate the experience of companies listing and raising capital on the AIM, which is privately regulated and relies on Nominated Advisors who compete for listings and provide regulatory oversight. AIM firms underperform newly listed firms on traditionally regulated exchanges based on...

This study examines whether and how the properties of corporate bond ratings change following Moody׳s and S&P׳s adoptions of the issuer-pay business model in the early 1970s. Regulators and debt market observers have criticized the issuer-pay model for creating an independence problem....

Industry expertise is an important aspect of sell-side research. We explore this aspect using a novel dataset of industry recommendations, which are often issued by strategy analysts. We study sell-side analysts' ability to rank industries relative to each other (across-industry expertise), and...

Prior work finds that managers beneficially time their purchases, but not sales, prior to forecasts. Focusing on if (as opposed to when) a forecast is given, we link insider selling to silence in advance of earnings disappointments. This raises the question of whether the absence of...

We find a negative association between a state׳s fiscal condition and the use of discretion in applying Governmental Accounting Standards Board (GASB) rules to understate pension funding gaps. We also find that the use of discretion is negatively associated with states’ decisions to increase...

We examine the information environments of firms following large, non-recurring charges (“baths”). We test competing hypotheses about the consequences of a bath—a bath either improves the information environment (the transparency hypothesis) or degrades it (the opacity hypothesis)....

This study examines changes in CEOs׳ incentive to manage their firms׳ reported earnings during their tenure. Earnings overstatement is greater in the early years than in the later years of CEOs׳ service, and this relation is less pronounced for firms with greater external and internal...