Exploiting the staggered releases of satellite data on parking lot traffic across U.S. retailers, we study how improved business observability affects corporate voluntary disclosure. We document that following satellite traffic data release, firms significantly suppress issuing management...

We test two potential hypotheses regarding the effects of major customer concentration on firm profitability. Under the collaboration hypothesis, customer power facilitates collaboration and both the supplier firm and its major customers obtain benefits. Under the competition hypothesis,...

We examine whether the two distinct post-earnings-announcement drifts associated with seasonal random walk-based and analyst-based earnings surprises are attributable to the trading activities of distinct sets of investors. We predict and find that small (large) traders continue to trade in the...

This study identifies a new systematic difference between managers' predictions about the firm's earnings performance and the firm's ex post realized results. Over the period 1996 to 2004, nearly half of managers' voluntarily-issued point forecasts of EPS end in nickel intervals, such as an...

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

We argue that a firm’s suppliers and customers prefer it to account more conservatively due to information asymmetry and these stakeholders’ asymmetric payoffs with respect to the firm’s performance. We predict that a firm meets this demand for accounting conservatism when suppliers or...