We construct term structures for expected earnings growth by indexing analyst forecasts according to their maturity. Growth stocks, large stocks, and past losers have relatively steep convex earnings term structures in comparison to value stocks, small stocks, and past winners respectively. These initial earnings term structures overestimate (underestimate) the expected earnings growth of growt...

vi List of Figures xiii Chapter I Risk Management, Executive Compensation and the Cross-Section of Corporate Earnings 1

The widespread use of accounting information by investors and financial analysts to help value stocks creates an incentive for managers to manipulate earnings in an attempt to influence short-term stock price performance. This paper examines the role of earnings management in affecting a firm’s cost of capital. Using an agency model with multiple firms whose cash flows are correlated, we demons...

This study investigates the impact of IT investments and several contextual variables on the volatility of future earnings. We find evidence that IT investments strongly increases the volatility of future earnings and that four contextual factorsindustry concentration, sales growth, diversification, and leveragestrongly moderate IT’s effect on earnings volatility. It is notable that while the m...

Intimate partner violence (IPV) is a serious, widespread problem that negatively affects women's lives, including their economic status. The current study explored whether the financial harm associated with IPV begins as early as adolescence. With longitudinal data from a sample of 498 women currently or formerly receiving welfare, we used latent growth curve modeling to examine the relationshi...

This study uses a random effect panel model to examine the impact of CEO traits and compensation on earnings performance and financial leverage for the 729 listed US companies in ExecuComp over the period of 2001– 2010. The results indicate that CEO cash compensation has a negative relationship with earnings performance, but that it has a positive impact on financial leverage. Moreover, for CEO...

We measure the importance of risk within a firm that pays its workers piece rates, exploiting data from payroll records and a series of field experiments conducted within the firm. These data are used to identify and estimate worker preferences, abilities and risk exposure. These estimates are combined to measure the workers’ cost of risk: their willingness to pay to avoid risky contracts. We f...

This paper provides a dynamic rational expectations equilibrium model in which investors have heterogeneous information and investment opportunities. Informed investors privately receive advance information about future earnings that is unrelated to current earnings. In response to good advance information, stock prices increase and informed investors act as trend chasers, increasing their inve...

We study the impact of firms’ abnormal business operations on their future crash risk in stock prices. Computed based on real earnings management (REM) models, firms' deviation in real operations from industry norms (DRO) is shown to be positively associated with their future crash risk. This association is incremental to that between discretionary accruals (DA) and crash risk found by prior st...