Working Papers

“Buy Now Pay Later” (BNPL) is a largely unregulated FinTech innovation that provides consumers with easy access to credit for specific retail purchases. The BNPL market is projected to reach $1 trillion by 2025, but we know little about the…

This study finds that voluntary non-earnings disclosures substitute for redacted proprietary contract information. When firms redact contract information, they provide more voluntary disclosures and have higher information uncertainty and…

An extensive literature examines whether senior executives’ contractual incentives influence their financial reporting decisions. However, little is known about whether —  and how — the incentives of lower-level (or “rank-and-file”) employees,…

Equity book-to-market ratios (BTM) should not exceed one if a firm’s return on equity exceeds its cost of capital or it employs conservative accounting. Yet, BTM is above one for many firms, particularly in recession years. We address whether…

Our study addresses whether integrated report quality, IRQ, is negatively associated with stock price synchronicity, an inverse measure of firm-specific information, and the extent to which the relation between IRQ and synchronicity is attenuated…

We examine the spillover effect of public firm innovation disclosures on the patent trading market. Relative to equity markets, the patent market is decentralized and rife with information frictions, yet it serves as an important mechanism…

We propose and describe a corporate carbon reporting framework intended to strengthen the credibility and transparency of the existing net-zero pledges. We refer to this framework as the Time-Consistent Corporate Carbon Reporting (TCCR) standard…

Conditionally accepted at the Journal of Accounting and Economics.

We investigate the relationship between private firms’ disclosures and the demand for the equity of their publicly traded peers. Using data on the global movement…

We examine how information about the diversity of a potential employer’s workforce affects individuals’ job-seeking behavior, and whether workers’ preferences explain corporate disclosure decisions. We embed a field experiment in job…

We study whether and how creditors exercise their control rights to shape their borrowers’ executive compensation plans. Highly levered borrowers often face incentives to underinvest due to agency conflicts driven by differences in time horizon…

Transparency of quality in the healthcare sector primarily aims to facilitate patients’ care decisions, however, it also provides useful information to competing healthcare providers. We study how competitors respond to increased transparency…

In this article we first summarize the specific plans articulated by seven major corporations for reducing their Corporate Carbon Footprints (abbreviated as CCF from hereon). Our sample is not intended to be representative of the broader…

This paper reviews the empirical methods used in the accounting literature to draw causal inferences. Similar to other social science disciplines, recent years have seen a burgeoning growth in the use of methods that seek to provide as-if random…

We find that financial reporting spurs consumer behavior. Using granular GPS data, we find that foot-traffic to firms’ commerce locations significantly increases in the days following their earnings announcements. Foot-traffic increases more for…

We examine whether and how firms structure their merger and acquisition (M&A) deals to avoid scrutiny from antitrust regulators. There are approximately 40% more M&As than expected bunching just below thresholds that trigger antitrust…

As governments around the world reaffirm their commitments to reduce carbon emissions at the national level, numerous global corporations have recently issued their own carbon reduction pledges. Such corporate “Net-Zero Club by 20xx” commitments…

The rapid transition to a decarbonized energy economy is widely believed to hinge on the rate of cost improvements for certain clean energy technologies, in particular renewable power and energy storage. This paper adopts the classical learning-…

We study the role of financial flexibility on COVID-19 employment actions. Using daily data from March through May 2020 for 354 of the largest U.S. employers, we find that firms facing a negative demand shock were 28.8 percentage points more…

We combine U.S. Census data with SEC enforcement actions to examine employees’ outcomes, such as wages and turnover, before, during, and after periods of fraudulent financial reporting. We find that fraud firms’ employees lose about 50% of…

We address whether analysts bias earnings forecast revisions and convey the bias using forecast revision consistency, i.e., the extent to which analyst reports with earnings forecast revisions include stock recommendation and target price…