Executives with poor prior performance may be inclined to take excessive risk in the hope of meeting performance targets, in which case a compensation contract featuring severance pay can be optimal. While prior work has shown that severance can induce managers to take positive NPV risks, we...

This study finds that more conservative earnings have lower information content in that higher conditional conservatism decreases the speed with which equity investor disagreement and uncertainty resolve at earnings announcements. We find that a firm-year measure of conditional conservatism we...

This study documents a six-fold increase in short-term return reversals during earnings announcements relative to non-announcement periods. Following prior research, we use reversals as a proxy for expected returns market makers demand for providing liquidity. Our findings highlight significant...

This paper shows that an important link between investor sentiment and firm overvaluation is optimistic earnings expectations, and that management earnings guidance helps resolve sentiment-driven overvaluation. Using previously identified firm characteristics, we find that most of the negative...

<heading id="h1" level="1" implicit="yes" format="display">ABSTRACT</heading>We examine whether analysts' incentives to maintain good relationships with management contribute to the optimistic/pessimistic within-period time trend in analysts' forecasts. In our experiments, 81 experienced sell-side analysts from two brokerage firms predict earnings based on...

Prior research provides only weak and controversial evidence that people overestimate the likelihood of desirable events (wishful thinking), but strong evidence that people bet more heavily on those events (wishful betting). Two experiments show that wishful betting contaminates beliefs in...