This study extends the employee stock option literature by examining how the timing of sales of shares acquired at exercise varies with accrual management both before and after the exercise date. We find evidence that accrual management prior to exercise is positively associated with the...

Khan and Watts (2009) develop a firm-year measure of conditional conservatism, labeled C_Score, that builds on the Basu (1997) asymmetric timeliness (AT) measure. However, recent research documents an asymmetric relation between lagged earnings and current returns, indicative of bias in the Basu...

The executive compensation literature presumes that shareholders offer risk-averse managers stock options to entice them to take on more risk, resulting in riskier investment decisions and thus a greater return on investment. However, recent empirical work challenges this assumption, and...

We examine how the provision of quarterly earnings guidance is affected by constraints on earnings management. We argue that costs of falling short of one's own guidance make managers reluctant to issue guidance without sufficient flexibility in their financial reporting system to manage...

Prior literature refers to economic incentives to generate investment banking business and trading commissions as explanations for analyst publication of forecasts of firms' long-term earnings growth (LTG). Prior research also documents wildly optimistic LTG forecasts and a negative relation...