This paper studies how investors infer CEO commitment to honesty from earnings management and how these perceptions – in conjunction with investors’ own social and moral preferences – shape their investment choices. We conduct two laboratory experiments simulating investment choices. Our...

Extant research shows that CEO characteristics affect earnings management. This paper studies how investors infer a specific characteristic of CEOs, namely moral commitment to honesty, from earnings management and how this perception - in conjunction with their own social and moral preferences -...

This paper analyzes board independence and competence as distinct, but inextricably linked aspects of board effectiveness. Competent directors add shareholder value because they have better information about the quality of projects. While a CEO cares about shareholder value, he also wants his...

Managers conducting earnings conference calls display distinctive styles in their word choice. Some CEOs and CFOs are straight talkers. Others, by contrast, are vague talkers. Vague talkers routinely use qualifying words indicating uncertainty, such as “approximately”, “probably”, or...

We argue that incentives to take equity risk ("equity incentives") only partially capture incentives to take asset risk ("asset incentives"). This is because leverage, while central to the theory of risk shifting, is not explicitly considered by equity incentives. Employing measures of asset...