Kai Pan,1,2 Alexander P. McCauley,1 Alejandro W. Rodriguez,1 M. T. Homer Reid,1,2 Jacob K. White,2,3 and Steven G. Johnson2,4 1Department of Physics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139, USA 2Research Laboratory of Electronics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139, USA 3Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, ...

1 1Society of Fellows, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA. 2Department of Genetics, Harvard Medical School, Boston, Massachusetts, USA. 3Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA. 4Program in Biological and Biomedical Sciences, Harvard Medical School, Boston, Massachusetts, USA. 5Department of Stem Cell and Regenerativ...

1 Center for Global Health, Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston, Massachusetts, United States of America, 2 Harvard Medical School, Boston, Massachusetts, United States of America, 3 Division of Pulmonary and Critical Care, Department of Medicine, Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston, Massachusetts, United States of America, 4 HIV Pathogenesis Programme, Doris Duke Medical Research Institu...

Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA Wellman Center for Photomedicine, Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston, MA, USA Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA Institute for Medical Engineering and Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA Edwin L. Steele Laboratories, Department of Radiation Oncology, ...

The sharp distinction drawn between firms rated narrowly above (BBB–) and below (BB+) the investment-grade cutoff provides variation in debt financing availability unrelated to firm fundamentals. We exploit this market segmentation to identify an asymmetric effect of debt capital supply on voluntary disclosure: BB+ firms step up disclosure in response to high-yield bond mutual fund outflows. Th...

This study provides exploratory evidence on auditors’ framing and evaluation of hypotheses, identifies implications for improving audit decision-making and facilitates the interpretation of prior research. Prior studies usually assume hypotheses to be framed as mutually exclusive and exhaustive. However, both verbal protocol evidence and probability assessments reveal that in a realistic case m...

Managers, consultants, and the financial press assert that compensation plans based on residual income change managers’ behavior. This assertion is empirically tested by selecting a sample of firms that began using a residual income performance measure in their compensation plans and comparing their performance to a control sample of firms that continue to use traditional accounting earnings-ba...

I find evidence consistent with managers manipulating real activities to avoid reporting annual losses. Specifically, I find evidence suggesting price discounts to temporarily increase sales, overproduction to report lower cost of goods sold, and reduction of discretionary expenditures to improve reported margins. Cross-sectional analysis reveals that these activities are less prevalent in the ...

This study examines whether institutional investors’ voting for All-Star financial analysts is affected by analyst beauty. Using a sample of 1,135 U.S. analysts and controlling for analyst performance, we document that beauty, on average, does not affect the outcome of All-Star analyst voting. However, a beauty premium emerges in those sectors where there is high information asymmetry on analys...