This study examines the challenge of implicit communication -- qualitative statements, tone, and non-verbal cues -- to the effectiveness of enforcing corporate disclosure regulation. We use a Regulation Fair Disclosure (Reg FD) setting, given that the SEC adopted the regulation recognizing that...

I use experimental and survey evidence to investigate how and why audience size affects managers' disclosure content in private meetings with investors. The experiment uses a 2x2 between-subjects design with 328 experienced managers. I predict and find that larger audiences decrease bad news...

The overall market for derivative securities is often estimated as more than ten times the World's GDP and many decry the complexity of derivatives as a main contributor to the subprime financial crisis. In this paper, we investigate whether and why complexity is used as a proxy for risk when...

Amidst growing pressure from investors and the general public, CEOs increasingly express their views on social, environmental, and political issues. Using an experiment, we offer initial evidence on the effect of this CEO activism on investor decision-making. Specifically, we examine how the...

We use an experiment with experienced managers to provide more-direct evidence on how reporting goals and firm performance influence language choices. We find that bad news disclosures are less readable than good news, but only when managers have a stronger self-enhancement motive. Our results...

Prior literature suggests that investors react less strongly to information in less readable disclosures. We extend this literature by considering how disclosure readability affects the sensitivity of investors' valuation judgments to the information contained in outside (i.e., non-firm) sources...

Individuals who evaluate business-related risks often have a preference or goal for the business to perform well. In this paper, we test how such a directional goal affects risk perceptions and the relation between risk perceptions and assessments of value in an investment context. Compared to...

This paper independently replicates the results of the survey of experienced financial managers reported in section 4 of Libby and Rennekamp (2012). Using the same questions as Libby and Rennekamp (2012), we survey 110 experienced managers to examine their beliefs about the relationship between...

This paper examines how the reversibility of the accounting effect of asset impairments affects managers' investment decisions. We conduct two experiments in which participants act as CEO of a multi-division electronics company that suffers a large asset impairment at one of the divisions....