We study the effects of local religious beliefs on mutual fund risk-taking behaviors. Funds located in low-Protestant or high-Catholic areas exhibit significantly higher fund return volatilities. Similar differences persist when we use the religiosity ratios at fund managers' college locations....

Industry concentration measures calculated with Compustat data, which cover only the public firms in an industry, are poor proxies for actual industry concentration. These measures have correlations of only 13% with the corresponding U.S. Census measures, which are based on all public and...

Using a sample of earnings restatements, we provide evidence that an empirical measure of the comparability in two firms' earnings (“earnings comparability”) captures the extent to which a firm's accounting choices and estimates are similar to those of its restating peer firm. We then...

We use proprietary data on rank-and-file employees from a large sample to document a negative relation between the percentage of female rank-and-file accounting employees and firms' propensity for internal control weaknesses. This relation is curvilinear. The effect is strong when female...

Over 70% of publicly traded U.S. firms are interconnected through institutional investors' cross-blockholding. We study the implications of such emerging ownership patterns for financial reporting, and document a robust, negative association between accruals and institutional cross-blockholding....

We examine whether bereavement affects managerial investment decisions in large organizations using the exogenous events of managers' family deaths. We find evidence in separate samples of mutual funds and publicly traded firms that bereaved managers take less risk. Mutual funds managed by...

We provide evidence that the presence of technical expertise in a firm's governance structure allows the firm to reduce reliance on contractual incentives to control the potential agency problem. Specifically, we find that firms with a board finance committee, or a Chief Executive Officer (CEO)...

This study examines firm performance surrounding insiders' Prepaid Variable Forward (PVF) transactions to infer insiders' information when they enter these off-market contracts. PVFs allow insiders to hedge downside risk, share performance gains, and obtain immediate large-sum cash payments for...

We investigate whether the positive associations between discretionary accrual proxies and beating earnings benchmarks hold for comparisons of groups segregated at other points in the distributions of earnings, earnings changes, and analysts-based unexpected earnings. We refer to these points as...

Management frequently attributes earnings news to various economic events. Using textual analysis, we identify the economic factors underlying earnings news from press releases. We document a wide range of industry-wide shocks and firm-specific actions to which the earnings news in management...