We document a strong positive initial market reaction to merger announcements from bidders with either large earnings growth or significant earnings decline, relative to those with neutral earnings change, reflecting a U-shaped pattern between bidders’ earnings growth and announcement returns....

A great number of academic papers evaluate the potential for incentive-driven bias in sell-side analysts' earnings forecasts. Yet bias does not necessarily invalidate a forecast, nor does it impinge on its relative quality. We find that analysts' forecasts are optimistic relative to recently...

We examine the effect of financial markets on the tone manipulation of earnings press releases by CEOs. We find that CEOs with high compensation convexity are significantly more likely to employ positive tone management right after recent high industry returns. Further analysis shows that this...