Management Science, forthcoming.
Coauthored with Brady Twedt and Jessica Watkins

Firms use press releases as a way to communicate with investors and to self-promote to improve their image. We find that promotional press releases are less value relevant, contain more positive and emotional language, and less specific and financial-oriented language. Further, we find that firms’ recent usage of press releases to self-promote is associated with increased investor attention and more efficient reactions to subsequent investor-focused disclosures.

Review of Accounting Studies, forthcoming.
Coauthored with Kristian Allee and Ryan Cating

With newspaper employment dropping precipitously in the last few decades, we posit that these changes will have a detrimental effect on local firms’ information environments. We find that volatility, spreads, and illiquidity increase as local newspaper intensity declines, and that this is associated with firms’ importance in their local economy. We further find that for firms that are more important in their community, or have busy analysts, less local newspaper intensity is associated with significantly lower analyst accuracy and higher forecast dispersion. This is consistent with local newspapers improving information environments, even for sophisticated and likely remote information intermediaries.

Review of Accounting Studies, 2024.
Coauthored with Erin Henry and George Plesko

We find that the sales of insiders at firms with connections to China were significantly more profitable during the COVID-19 crisis than the sales of insiders at firms without connections to China. Consistent with greater attentiveness to public information about the COVID-19 pandemic, this result is driven by China connected insiders executing larger (smaller) sales in the early (late) COVID-19 period than non–China connected insiders. China connected insiders avoided $375 million in aggregate losses by selling stock before the initial stages of the COVID–19–induced market decline.

Review of Accounting Studies, 2024.
Coauthored with Stephen Rowe

Compared to other owners, index fund managers face greater constraints and limitations when selecting portfolio investments and making trading decisions about whether, and when, to enter or exit a position. Using hand-collected data, we find that greater index fund ownership is associated with less bias and less obfuscation in financial reporting. Additional analysis finds results consistent with this effect being due to index funds wielding power through lower trading and not higher oversight.

The Accounting Review, 2023.
Coauthored with Brady Twedt and Jessica Watkins

We examines managers’ strategic use of concurrent disclosures. We find that managers disclosing negative 8-K news are more likely to issue a concurrent press release about an unrelated event in order to increase investor processing costs. We find that managers more commonly issue concurrent unrelated press releases when they have stronger incentives to impede the pricing of negative information, and that doing so is associated with a reduction in the speed with which prices reflect the news. Our findings shed light on a previously unexplored tool managers use to exploit investors’ processing capacity constraints to “hide” negative news.

Review of Accounting Studies, 2022.

I find that firms with overconfident CEOs provide significantly more R&D disclosures than firms without overconfident CEOs. This result is driven by observations where proprietary costs are more significant. Further, I find that the return on R&D is significantly lower when firms have more R&D disclosure. Collectively, these results suggest that manager perception of proprietary costs is an important determinant of firms’ voluntary proprietary disclosure.

Journal of Accounting Research, 2018.
Coauthored with Yonca Ertimur, Jonathan Rogers, and Sarah Zechman

We hand collect data for externally hired CEOs at public companies from 1992-2014 to examine the role of CEO employment gaps in the executive labor market. We find that CEOs with gaps have lower compensation and univariate evidence of a shorter time to turnover. Finally, we provide descriptive evidence on what executives do (e.g., sit on boards, work for private consulting companies, or consume leisure) during their gaps.