We study the role of executive functional background in explaining management discretion in financial reporting. Taking goodwill impairment as our reporting setting, we focus on top executives (CEOs and CFOs) whose employment history includes experience in investment banking, private equity,...

We document negative stock returns and elevated trading volumes around executives' early option exercise disclosures post-SOX but not pre-SOX. This stock price reaction is incomplete, and the negative stock price drift is smaller post-SOX compared to pre-SOX. We also show effects of media...

We investigate if high-ability managers are more likely to intentionally smooth earnings, a form of earnings management, and when they are more likely to do so. Although prior studies provide evidence that high-ability managers report higher quality earnings, the literature does not indicate...

We propose a measure of managerial ability, based on managers' efficiency in generating revenues, which is available for a large sample of firms and outperforms existing ability measures. We find that our measure is strongly associated with manager fixed effects, and that the stock price...

We document that, when revising their short-term earnings forecasts in response to management guidance, analysts wishing to curry favor with management weight the guidance more heavily than predicted based on the credibility and usefulness of the guidance. This overweighting of guidance is...