We explore whether firm managers trade on future stock price crash risk. This depends on managers’ ability to assess future crash risk, and on whether the expected payoff is greater than the expected ...costs associated with potential reputation loss and litigation risk. We find that insider sales are positively associated with future crash risk, which is consistent with managers’ trading on crash risk for personal gain. We also find that managers take advantage of high information opacity to pursue crash-risk-based insider sales more aggressively, but are less able to capitalize on this in the case of financial constraints or post-SOX.
Corporate tax avoidance is likely to be associated with a high level of earnings management and with high financial opacity in the time-series. On this basis, we hypothesize that analyst coverage is ...negatively associated with corporate tax avoidance. Our results confirm this conjecture, and are robust to using a firm-fixed-effects model and a quasi-natural experiment to control for potential endogeneity. Additional analysis shows that analyst coverage is negatively related to tax risk, but there is no evidence that the informativeness of, or errors in, analyst forecasts are associated with tax avoidance. Overall, our study advances understanding of the implications of corporate tax avoidance for analyst behavior.
This study investigates the effect of CEO inside debt holdings on financial reporting quality. I find that higher CEO inside debt holdings are associated with lower abnormal accruals, higher accruals ...quality, a lower likelihood of an earnings misstatement, and a lower incidence of earnings benchmark beating, suggesting that CEO inside debt promotes high financial reporting quality. Additional analyses reveal that (1) CEO inside debt holdings reduce firm-specific stock price crash risk, and that (2) auditors are less likely to report a material internal control weakness for firms that have large CEO inside debt.
Nonfinancial disclosures of product and business expansion planning occur frequently in practice and are an important vehicle by which managers convey corporate information to outsiders. However, ...little is known about how the opportunistic incentives of managers affect the choice of such nonfinancial disclosures. This study examines whether managers make their nonfinancial disclosures strategically for self-serving trading incentives. I find strong and robust evidence to suggest that managers manipulate the timing and selectivity of their nonfinancial disclosures in an attempt to maximize trading profits. Specifically, managers tend to disclose bad (good) news on products or business expansion before purchasing (selling) shares. I also find that such strategic behavior is more evident when the expected price impact of the disclosures is greater and when the CEOs are more powerful. However, I do not find evidence that the strategic behavior is weaker for firms with high institutional stock ownership. Overall, my results contribute to understanding managers’ strategic use of nonfinancial disclosures in fulfilling personal trading incentives, and should be of interest to boards of directors charged with the responsibility of monitoring and restricting opportunistic managerial disclosures and insider trades.
This study first establishes a robust link between credit rating and post‐earnings‐announcement drift (PEAD). I find strong evidence that PEAD is more salient for firms with low credit ratings. This ...finding is consistent with the notion that investors are prone to underreact to earnings news from low credit rating firms that are characterized by high uncertainty of asset fundamentals. The association between credit rating and PEAD is not driven by traditional information uncertainty proxies such as earnings volatility, cash flow volatility, accruals quality, firm age, idiosyncratic volatility, and analyst forecast dispersion. I further investigate whether transient institutions exploit the differential of PEAD among different rated firms in their arbitrage trades. The results reveal that transient institutions tend to focus their arbitrage on low credit rating firms. However, the existence and concentration of PEAD in low credit rating firms suggest that transient institutions fail to arbitrage away PEAD among low‐rated firms and that the arbitrage strategy is riskier than expected by the transient institutions. This in turn implies that estimation risk associated with pricing the earnings news of low‐rated firms plays a substantive role in forming the strong PEAD of these firms.
Using a sample of 2174 Chinese listed firms for the period 2014–2019, we examine whether air pollution impairs investment efficiency of firms. We find robust evidence that air pollution is negatively ...associated with firms’ investment efficiency, and that this association is more pronounced for small firms, non-state-owned firms, financially constrained firms, and firms confronted with high business risk or intense industrial product market competition.
•Air pollution impairs firms’ investment efficiency.•Air pollution exacerbates either over-investments or under-investments by firms.•The impact of air pollution on investment efficiency varies across different firms.
This study investigates whether and how financial constraints on firms affect the risk of their stock price crashing. We find strong evidence that financial constraints increase future stock price ...crash risk. This finding is robust to using two quasi-natural experiments to control for potential endogeneity. We also provide evidence to suggest that bad news hoarding and default risk explain the crash risk of financially constrained firms. Cross-sectional analysis reveals that the positive relation between financial constraints and future crash risk is more prominent for firms with weak corporate governance. Our study is of interest to investors as well as other stakeholders concerned about firms' creditworthiness and viability.
This study investigates whether managers influence credit ratings via voluntary disclosures. I find that firms near a rating change have a higher incidence of a disclosure regarding product and ...business expansion (PBE) plans. This finding is more evident for firms that are subject to lower proprietary costs of disclosures, which implies that managers do trade off both the benefits and costs of the disclosures. I find no evidence that firms close to a rating change selectively release good news or suppress bad news on PBE. Overall, my results suggest that firms generally exhibit a credible commitment to maintaining disclosure transparency for a desired credit rating.
Derivatives are increasingly used by managers not only to hedge risks but also to pursue nonhedging activities for fulfilling opportunistic incentives. The Statement of Financial Accounting Standards ...No. 161 (SFAS 161) requires firms to disclose their objectives and strategies for using derivatives. Using the adoption of this standard, we examine whether and how derivative disclosures influence managerial opportunistic behavior. We employ insider trades and stock price crash risk to capture managerial opportunism. Applying a difference‐in‐differences research design with hand‐collected data on derivative designations, we find that, after the implementation of SFAS 161, derivative users that comply with SFAS 161 experience a significantly greater decrease in both insider trades and stock price crash risk, compared with a matched control sample of nonderivative‐users. We further provide evidence to suggest that SFAS 161 curbs managerial opportunism via reducing information asymmetry between corporate insiders and outside investors and enhancing the effectiveness of derivative hedging.
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