This paper investigates the role of outside options in the executive labor market on earnings management decisions. To proxy for executives’ outside options, we use the number of times other firms cite the executive’s firm as a compensation peer. We find that executives with more citations...

Using hand-collected data on chief executive officer (CEO) non-compete agreements (NCAs), we find that NCAs are less likely when CEOs expect to incur greater personal costs from reduced job mobility and more likely when firms expect to suffer greater economic harm if departing CEOs work for...

Using hand-collected CEO education data of 3574 CEOs over the period of 2000 to 2015, we document that CEOs are significantly more likely to acquire targets that are headquartered in those states where the CEOs received their undergraduate and graduate degrees. Education-state deals are larger,...