We examine the prevalence and determinants of CEOs' use of tax-advantaged trusts prior to their firm's IPO. Twenty-three percent of CEOs use tax-advantaged pre-IPO trusts, and share transfers into tax-advantaged trusts are positively associated with CEO equity wealth, estate taxes, and dynastic...

The SEC adopted Rule 10b5-1 to provide an affirmative defense against allegations of insider trading to executives whose jobs regularly expose them to material nonpublic information. In this Closer Look, we present evidence on the trading behavior of corporate executives using a unique dataset...

This paper investigates whether adoptions of executive stock ownership plans coincide with decreased incentives to meet or just beat analysts' near-term EPS forecasts. Firms often assert that ownership plans focus executives on long-term performance. I find that the impact of these adoptions on...

We examine the relation between managerial trading and market sentiment. We investigate whether managers' trades are associated with changes in market sentiment, and we find they are negatively related. We then explore cross-sectional differences in managerial trading and find trading against...

We examine auditors' disclosure benchmarking, which we define as auditors' acquisition of non-client financial statement information for the purpose of evaluating a client's financial statement information. Employing a novel dataset that captures auditors' access of non-client annual and...