Demand for disclosures on environmental, social and governance (ESG) issues has increased dramatically. Using corporate political spending disclosures as our setting, we conduct a detailed inquiry of 541 political spending-related shareholder proposals from 2004 to 2012 to highlight the role of...

Demand for disclosures on environmental, social and governance (ESG) issues has increased dramatically. Using corporate political spending disclosures as our setting, we conduct a detailed inquiry of 541 political spending-related shareholder proposals from 2004 to 2012 to highlight the role of...

We empirically examine the antecedents of shareholder activism related to increasing the gender diversity of corporate boards of directors (BOD) and whether such activism is an effective mechanism for achieving this goal. Because both ethical and economic considerations may drive campaigns for...

This paper explores the use of specific accruals in managing earnings. We argue that the costs of managing earnings through different income statement items vary and that the benefits of earnings management through each of these items are context-dependent. We thus make differential predictions...

This study investigates whether opportunistic earnings management affects the value relevance of net income and book value in determining stock price. We document a decrease in the value relevance of earnings in the year of an equity offering for a group of firms that exhibit ex post evidence of...

There is relatively little evidence on the specific accruals used to manage earnings. This paper examines this issue by considering the use of specific accruals in three earnings management contexts: equity offerings, management buyouts, and firms avoiding earnings decreases. We argue that the...