Based on two samples of high quality personality data for chief executive officers (CEOs), we use linguistic features extracted from conferences calls and statistical learning techniques to develop a measure of CEO personality in terms of the Big Five traits: agreeableness, conscientiousness,...

In March 2013, Lululemon Athletica removed its inventory of women's black yoga pants from its stores because recent shipments of the product were “too sheer.” For a company reliant on a reputation for quality, the news was devastating. Worse, the recall set off a series of PR related...

This paper examines the economic consequences of institutional investors outsourcing research and voting decisions in public company elections to proxy advisory firms. We investigate the implications of these decisions in the context of shareholder say-on-pay voting required in 2011 under the...

This Closer Look illustrates the relation between executive compensation and organizational risk through the context of the financial crisis of 2008. We demonstrate that the incentives that bankers had to increase firm risk not only increased but increased substantially in the years preceding...

The shareholders of public corporations have considerable interest in the choice of individual to serve as CEO of their company. They want to be assured that the company has a viable plan in place to replace the current CEO if necessary. Historically, boards have deferred to outgoing CEO,...

Researchers in accounting, corporate finance, economics, and law regularly evaluate the impact of corporate governance provisions on firm performance and managerial actions. Many of these studies rely on publicly available governance summaries developed by the Investor Responsibility Research...

This paper examines the approaches accounting researchers use to draw causal inferences using observational (or non-experimental) data. The vast majority of accounting research papers draw causal inferences notwithstanding the well-known difficulties in doing so. While some recent papers seek to...

Institutional investors are highly dissatisfied with the quality of information that they receive about corporate governance policies and practices in the annual proxy. Across the board, they want proxies to be shorter, more concise, more candid, and less legal. The largest complaint involves...